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Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest: Linguistic and pragmatic approaches
Edited by Ilaria Fiorentini and Chiara Zanchi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 347] 2024
► pp. 85–108

Chapter 5
Ambiguity in discourse

The Tübingen Interdisciplinary Corpus of Ambiguity Phenomena

| University of Tübingen

Ambiguity in language and communication has recently come under increasing attention in a number of disciplines, such as linguistics, literary science, psychology, theology, and law. In this paper, we focus on ambiguity in discourse and present an online corpus which contains rich annotations for a variety of examples of ambiguity from different text genres and periods. The corpus features an annotation schema that allows users to specify the multiple attributes of an ambiguity, as well as its interaction with related but distinct phenomena, such as vagueness and underspecification. We discuss how this corpus might foster and enable the interdisciplinary study of ambiguity.

Keywords: ambiguity, strategic ambiguity, production, perception, digital humanities, interdisciplinary corpus
Article outline
  • 1.Studying ambiguity across disciplines
    • 1.1Definitions
      • 1.1.1Ambiguity, vagueness, and underspecification
      • 1.1.2Strategic and non-strategic ambiguity
      • 1.1.3Further distinctions
  • 2.Structure of the corpus
  • 3.Non-strategic ambiguity
    • 3.1Non-strategic ambiguity production
      • 3.1.1The letters of Paul
      • 3.1.2Ambiguity in news headlines
    • 3.2Non-strategic perception
  • 4.Strategic ambiguity
    • 4.1Strategic production
      • 4.1.1The letters of Paul
      • 4.1.2Strategic production: Two examples from fiction
    • 4.2Strategic perception
  • 5.Communication levels
  • 6.Conclusion
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
This content is being prepared for publication; it may be subject to changes.
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