The English language is wonderfully bizarre, and sometimes rather frightful. It is a composite of the best and worst that ancient languages have to offer, and native speakers often take it for granted that they can speak it with the utmost fluency.
English does have its fair share of problems, however – not least in lexical and semantic ambiguity. This list serves to shed some light on some of the quirks and idiosyncrasies which have made English one of the most widely discussed languages in the world.
1. Garden Path Sentences
Example: The horse raced past the barn fell.
A garden path sentence refers to a type of sentence where an initial reading of the phrase will likely be incorrect; it will thus call for a re-reading. In this example, ‘raced past the barn’ is a reduced relative clause, meaning it lacks a relative pronoun – a who, which, or that. The correct parsing of the sentence would hence be ‘The horse – who was raced past the barn – fell.’ This gives a much fuller understanding of the sentence and it can now be understood that the word ‘fell’ is the main verb.
Other interpretations can also exist; a ‘fell’ could be a noun (meaning a mountain or hill). In this sense, ‘raced’ could be the verb and ‘barn fell’ could mean the fell by the barn. This leads onto the next point.
2. Syntactic Ambiguity
Example: I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola.
Syntactic ambiguity allows for multiple meanings of the same sentence. In this sentence, “I’m glad I’m a man, and so is Lola.” This can mean one of four things: “Lola and I are both glad I’m a man,” “I’m glad Lola and I are both men,” “I’m glad I’m a man, and Lola is also a man,” or “I’m glad I’m a man, and Lola is also glad to be a man.”
Other sentences might hinge on the word order of a sentence: is “The Electric Light Orchestra” an orchestra consisting of electric lights, or is it a light orchestra that happens to be electric? I suppose we’ll never know.
3. Paraprosdokians
Example: I’ve had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn’t it.
The late great Groucho Marx is credited for this comic ingenuity, a sentence which is a prime example of a paraprosdokian: a phrase which figuratively sucker-punches you. The listener or reader will have to reframe or reinterpret the earlier clause.
From the Greek ‘para’ meaning ‘against’ and ‘prosdokia’ meaning ‘expectation’, a paraprosdokian leaves the reader somewhat baffled by the conclusion of the sentence. They are most often used for comedic effect (and can sometimes result in an anti-climax), especially by the supremely talented Mitch Hedberg: “I haven’t slept for ten days, because that would be too long.”
A generonym is the brand name we use to mean an everyday item. These terms have seeped into the general psyche and are used more often than their technical counterparts. We almost always ‘Google’ something instead of doing an ‘online search’. Perhaps one day I will choose to ‘Bing’ it. In the US especially, many people refer to cotton swabs as ‘Q-Tips’ after their brand name. Increasingly more popular nowadays is the process of ‘Photoshopping’ an image, after Adobe’s software of the same name.
Auto-antonyms are words with multiple meanings, two of which are antonyms of one another. Some are used in everyday language without our realising it: the word ‘off’ is guilty of this. We can turn something off, meaning it will cease to be on. Conversely, the alarm can go off, meaning it has – rather bizarrely – just turned on. In more technical terms, a ‘strike’ can, in baseball terminology, mean a hit or a miss.
Synonyms are certainly the most well-known lexical phenomenon in this list; but did you know that synonym has a synonym? That word is ‘poecilonym’. A synonym (or poecilonym) is a word which has a similar understanding and meaning to another word: ‘happy’ and ‘content’ are, for all intents and purposes, synonymous with one another.
5. Malapropisms
Example: Our watch, sir, we have comprehended two auspicious persons.
A malapropism occurs chiefly when a word or phrase means something different from the word the writer or speaker intended to use, or if the resulting sentence is nonsensical. The phrase above comes from Act II Scene V of William Shakespeare’s comedy Much Ado About Nothing, in which the hapless Constable Dogberry informs Governor Leonato that he has captured a couple of people who are thought to have committed a crime; Dogberry mistakenly uses the words “comprehended” and “auspicious” when, of course, he meant to use “apprehended” and “suspicious.” Comic ruckus arises soon after.
The primary reason given for the use of malapropisms, especially in spoken English, is the increasing need for people to use complex language in order to communicate their desire to be seen as intellectually superior to others.
6. Lexical Ambiguity
Example: Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo.
This unnecessary sentence is a prime example of lexical ambiguity, in which homonyms (words with the same spelling and pronunciation, but different meaning) and homophones (words that simply sound the same) can be combined to form a complex sentence structure with grammatical validity.
The proper noun Buffalo – a city in New York – is present, as is the animal buffalo. The third and most unusual term offered is that of the verb ‘to buffalo’ which means ‘to bully’ or ‘to intimidate.’ A more coherent parsing of the sentence would be “The buffalo from Buffalo who are buffaloed by buffalo from Buffalo, buffalo other buffalo from Buffalo.” The sentence offers little doubt that bison from New York are sentient and capable of emotionally scarring other bison from the surrounding area. Buffalo.