• Pneumenon
    463
    Okay, so lately I came up with this little idea about removing ambiguity from sentences by adding brackets in different places. I was curious to know if anyone has done this before, or if there is something similar to this in linguistics or philosophy of language or whatever. I kinda doubt that this is more useful than just re-explaining the sentence, but it's fun to play around with.

    Take the ambiguous, "I saw a man on a hill with a telescope."

    Possible Meanings
    1. “I saw a man, who was on a hill and had a telescope.”
    2. “I used a telescope to see a man who was on a hill.”
    3. “I was on a hill, and saw a man who had a telescope.”
    4. “I was on a hill, and used a telescope to see a man.”
    5. “I saw a man, who was on a hill, and the hill had a telescope on it.”
    6. “I saw a man, while I was on a hill which had a telescope on it.”

    Simplified versions of the above list
    1. Man on hill, man has telescope.
    2. I have telescope, man on hill.
    3. I'm on a hill, man has telescope.
    4. I'm on a hill, I use telescope to see man.
    5. Man on hill, telescope on hill, I see both.
    6. I'm on a hill, telescope is on a hill, I see man.

    Marked out with ambiguity brackets
    1. I saw (a [man] on a hill) [with a telescope].
    2. (I saw) [a man on a hill] (with a telescope).
    3. (I) saw [a man] (on a hill) [with a telescope].
    4. (I) [saw] a man (on a hill) [with a telescope].
    5. I saw a (man on a [hill]) [with a telescope].
    6. (I) saw a man (on a [hill with a telescope]).

    Parentheses "connect" phrases, as do brackets. So the final sentence, (I) connects to being on the hill, and the inner brackets carve out the phrase "hill with a telescope," which, in isolation, means that the hill has the telescope. Sentence 5, on the other hand, uses parentheses to carve out the phrase "man on a hill" to show that the man is on the hill, and connects "hill" to "with a telescope" to show that the hill has the telescope.

    I'm sure that linguistics has far more accurate/sophisticated ways of removing ambiguity, but I wanted to know if any of them work like this, or at least, roughly like this.
  • The Great Whatever
    2.2k
    Yes, you're roughly bracketing what a linguist would call the 'constituent structure' of the sentence: you get bracketings like this in intro linguistics classes to demonstrate structural ambiguities. Labeled bracketing is a standard notation in linguistics, as a way of representing syntactic structure generally, but it becomes very complicated as the pieces of machinery in the theory increase.

    The reason bracketing structure tends to coincide with disambiguation is that it's generally assumed interpretation is compositional, meaning the semantic content of a linguistic structure is systematically (generally functionally) composed from the meanings of its constituent parts. Different constituency structures lead to different systematic combinations, and so different meanings for the structures as a whole.

    For example, in 1) 'on a hill' and 'with a telescope' would be called nominal adjuncts to 'man,' and so semantically would be treated as modifiers of 'man.' But in 2), while 'on a hill' still modifies 'man,' 'with a telescope' is a verbal adjunct, and so modifies 'saw.' In the first case, 'with a telescope' intersects the set of men with the set of things in possession of telescopes; in the second, it intersects the set of man-seeing events with events making use of a telescope as instrument.
  • Cavacava
    2.4k
    Reminds me of Pynchon's Gravity Rainbow riff

    "You never did the Kenosha Kid". The hero (Tyrone) just got shot up with Sodium amytal (truth serum) and he plays with this phrase. Harold Bloom in his book "Thomas Pynchon" said that Pynchon is
    using language "in such a way that it can free itself of its bureaucratizing control of experience" (pg 97).

    You never did.
    The Kenosha Kid
    Bet you never did the "Kenosha," kid!
    Bet you never did the "Kenosha Kid."
    You! never did the Kenosha Kid
    You? Never! Did the Kenosha Kid
    You never did 'the,' Kenosha Kid!"
  • andrewk
    2.1k
    Yes, brackets solve the problem. They are more precise than commas, which is the usual tool. The downside of brackets is that people don't like them, complaining that they break up the flow. That's true, but if the flow leads you to the wrong place (conclusion), it needs breaking up. I often play around with different formulations of a sentence, to see if I can find an elegant way of writing it unambiguously, without having to resort to brackets.

    A solution that is useful in formal communication is bullet points. They are a way of bracketing without using brackets. They are copiously used in good legal drafting. They also allow for multi-level nesting without losing the reader, which is what tends to happen with brackets.
bold
italic
underline
strike
code
quote
ulist
image
url
mention
reveal
youtube
tweet
Add a Comment