言語の曖昧と多義について

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This is a faithful reproduction of twelve letters exchanged between H. Sakai (philosophy and logic) and K. Yamanaka (linguistics) concerning linguistic vagueness and ambiguity. In letter No. 1 (numbers consecutive), Y. gave some comments on S.' s previously published essay and pointed out that Japanese is generally understood to show a strong tendency to ambiguity, whereas French seems to enjoy a reputation of clarity and distinctness. He stressed that there must be some scientific ground in this common belief and suggested that it could be searched for in the language concerned, employing such concepts as transparency, vagueness, generality and ambiguity (structural homonymity). Throughout our correspondence, we have kept in mind such examples as : ( i ) He is an Indian fighter (ii) She made her dress fast (iii) They are burning straws and Y. made an analysis of them. But all the above examples and the analysis given seemed to S. not only insufficient but misleading. He thought that a complete meaning of an expression could only be given within a certain social situation and a linguistic context in which it happens to be used. In the earlier stage, S. imagined that Y. understood ambiguity and vagueness as categories of the meaning of an expression. Assuming this viewpoint S. rejected Y. because S. thought that ambiguity and vagueness arise only from the inability of a speaker to choose a suitable expression and that structure of a language should not bear any responsibility for it. He maintained there should be no absolute and objective criteria of ambiguity and vagueness inherent to the language. From letters No. 2 through 5, our central problem was how we could deal with the meaning of an expression universally and objectively without recourse to the situations in the above-mentioned sense. On this point we had totally different opinions. Y. asserted that it would be possible to deal with the ambiguity of an expression even in isolation from its context. While S. maintained that even though he would admit of the possibility of semantics, the treatment of ambiguity would lose its validity when cut off from the situation of communication. In letter No. 7, Y. tried to formulate a more exact definition of "ambiguity" and "vagueness", which is as follows : vagueness = A term is vague when it does not specify its range of application as in the case of "Far East", etc. ambiguity = Ambiguity (homonymity) is either lexical or structural, and the latter arises when a sentence or its constituent (s) is capable of more than one structural characterization. Following Y.' s suggestion we then gradually turned away from the philosophical discussion about meaning and ambiguity of meaning, and tried to characterize the formal properties of expressions which manifest ambiguity. Attention was also paid to the disjunctive form that appears in the explanation of the so-called ambiguous terms. The meaning of / nayt /, for instance, will be explained as (night or knight) and that of "bridge" as (a structure erected to afford a passage across a waterway or a game of cards). S. asked why we should not regard them as having a clear-cut unity of meaning. The fact that the connective "or" appears in this explanation seems to be no hindrance to the uniqueness of the meaning as a whole, since as symbolic logic teaches us, out of disjunction of two properties or two sentences we can make one property or one sentence respectively. At this point, it has become clear that the differences between us were much greater than the agreements about the nature of polysemy and attitudes towards ambiguity in general. To summarize, Y. thinks that vagueness which is directly concerned with non-verbal objects should better be excluded from the proper domain of linguistics, thus leaving generality and ambiguity alone in the legitimate interests of linguistics. From his point of view, ambiguity falls into two subclasses, lexical and structural, as they are related with tw
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言語の曖昧と多義について

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