Prof. Solum discusses vagueness vs. ambiguity, and the relationship between this distinction and the interpretation/construction decision, here.
I would characterize the difference in terms of linguistic architecture, as follows:
Ambiguity is what occurs when the sound or textual output matches more than one possible linguistic expression, where a linguistic expression includes a sound output, a meaning output, and the procedure that generates the pair of outputs. Ambiguity is the result of the fact that sounds and meanings do not perfectly correspond to one another.
Vagueness is what occurs when the meaning output of a linguistic expression, or a part thereof, corresponds to a concept (in our case, a legal concept) without clear boundaries. Vagueness is the result of the fact that our conceptual system is incomplete, so that it is not always known whether a certain object, for example, falls in a particular category. It is a necessary result in light of the fact that our conceptual system is discrete, while the world that it represents is often continuous.
The role of the interpreter/constructor in the case of an ambiguity is to select the appropriate meaning output in light of the sound output, using evidence such as the context in which the expression was generated, the likelihood that the meaning output was the one intended by the person or group articulating the linguistic expression, and the naturalness of the sound-meaning correspondence (a particular meaning can be possible but improbable, for example, if it presents great difficulty in linguistic processing).
The role of the interpreter/constructor in the case of vagueness is to modify the conceptual legal scheme so that it optimally covers the case at hand.
[edited for typos 1/17/2009]
Showing posts with label ambiguity. Show all posts
Showing posts with label ambiguity. Show all posts
Sunday, November 23, 2008
Saturday, August 16, 2008
A paper I wish I'd written
Shai Cohen brought this law review article to my attention. It's got so many things you want to see in a law article: linguistics, employment discrimination, eight-way ambiguities, upbraiding of judges for being insufficiently attentive to the nuances of language... well, it would have had upbraiding had I written it. Evidently the article's author, Jill C. Anderson, is less petty and more generous toward judges than I.
If I may brag, in my grad school days I wrote a paper in which I argued that the domain of events is, like the domain of entities is sometimes taken to be, divided along an individual/group axis as well as a singular/plural axis, with the upshot that sentences like Adin hit three boys five times is something like 13-ways ambiguous [aside to semanticists: I used a Landmanian analysis and took the theta-role functions to apply to group events, identifying individual events as the phases found in the literature on pluractionality]. I also managed to get an audience of linguists to see each of the thirteen or so distinct meanings. So: my contrived sentence is more ways ambiguous than Congress's carefully crafted one. Nyah!
If I may brag, in my grad school days I wrote a paper in which I argued that the domain of events is, like the domain of entities is sometimes taken to be, divided along an individual/group axis as well as a singular/plural axis, with the upshot that sentences like Adin hit three boys five times is something like 13-ways ambiguous [aside to semanticists: I used a Landmanian analysis and took the theta-role functions to apply to group events, identifying individual events as the phases found in the literature on pluractionality]. I also managed to get an audience of linguists to see each of the thirteen or so distinct meanings. So: my contrived sentence is more ways ambiguous than Congress's carefully crafted one. Nyah!
Wednesday, April 2, 2008
Static/Dynamic Ambiguities
The English -ing and -ed suffixes are rich sources of ambiguity. The former can mark nouns, adjectives and verbs:
The latter can mark verbs and adjectives:
I'll focus on ambiguity with -ed in this post. These ambiguities arise in circumstances that tolerate both verbs and adjectives, such as (1) in predicate position following a form of the verb be, and (2) in certain post-nominal (i.e. following the noun) restrictive phrases. For example:
It's actually more complicated than a verb/adjective distinction (see this paper by Angelika Kratzer, for instance), but we'll keep things simple and refer just to this distinction. This situation can cause problems because it can lead to textual ambiguities between a reading more focused on an event and a reading more focused on a state.
For example, territories occupied in the recent conflict can refer to those territories that were seized during the recent conflict (the more event-focused reading), or to the territories that were in the state of being occupied for the duration of the recent conflict. Suppose a country occupied a bunch of territory in 1948, and then in a conflict in 1967 occupied a bunch more territories. Then a resolution requiring the country's armed forces from "territories occupied in the recent conflict" is ambiguous between a requirement to leave the 1967-occupied territories and a requirement to leave both the 1948- and 1967-occupied territories.
As you may have guessed, this is not strictly a hypothetical. The text is from United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967, a few months after the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. I'm dealing with this text as my proposed note topic, but I'm treating a different issue: the controversial question of whether "territories occupied in the recent conflict" is universally or existentially quantified. But a friend of mine, who I'll call "Mr. S"*, pointed out this static/dynamic ambiguity, which I hadn't previously noticed.
Another non-hypothetical is the following text: "Any claim arising in respect of... the detention of any goods or merchandise by any officer of customs...." The case is Kosak v. United States, 465 U.S. 848 (1984), and the controversy is whether the text, which immunizes the United States from tort suits for claims that it describes, describes only claims arising from the act of detention, i.e. the seizure of the goods or merchandise, or whether it also covers claims arising from the state of detention, e.g. damage sustained while the goods or merchandise are in the government's storage warehouses. At least, I think that's what the dispute is - it's kind of hard to understand, and both Justice Marshall's majority opinion and Justice Stevens' dissents focus on the words arising in respect of rather than detention.
It has been suggested that there should be canons of drafting legislation to parallel canons of interpretation. Here's my prescription for drafters: Mind your Eds and your Ings! Or for the more formally inclined: Mind your participles and your gerunds!
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* His real name is Brian Polis
Noun: The happening took place yesterday.
Adjective: This is a pretty happening party.
Verb: I can't believe this is happening!
The latter can mark verbs and adjectives:
Verb: I stained the glass with paint.
Adjective: Stained glass adorned the church.
I'll focus on ambiguity with -ed in this post. These ambiguities arise in circumstances that tolerate both verbs and adjectives, such as (1) in predicate position following a form of the verb be, and (2) in certain post-nominal (i.e. following the noun) restrictive phrases. For example:
(1) The glass was stained.
(2) I missed the building obscured by the truck.
It's actually more complicated than a verb/adjective distinction (see this paper by Angelika Kratzer, for instance), but we'll keep things simple and refer just to this distinction. This situation can cause problems because it can lead to textual ambiguities between a reading more focused on an event and a reading more focused on a state.
For example, territories occupied in the recent conflict can refer to those territories that were seized during the recent conflict (the more event-focused reading), or to the territories that were in the state of being occupied for the duration of the recent conflict. Suppose a country occupied a bunch of territory in 1948, and then in a conflict in 1967 occupied a bunch more territories. Then a resolution requiring the country's armed forces from "territories occupied in the recent conflict" is ambiguous between a requirement to leave the 1967-occupied territories and a requirement to leave both the 1948- and 1967-occupied territories.
As you may have guessed, this is not strictly a hypothetical. The text is from United Nations Security Council Resolution 242, passed in November 1967, a few months after the conflict between Israel and the Arab states. I'm dealing with this text as my proposed note topic, but I'm treating a different issue: the controversial question of whether "territories occupied in the recent conflict" is universally or existentially quantified. But a friend of mine, who I'll call "Mr. S"*, pointed out this static/dynamic ambiguity, which I hadn't previously noticed.
Another non-hypothetical is the following text: "Any claim arising in respect of... the detention of any goods or merchandise by any officer of customs...." The case is Kosak v. United States, 465 U.S. 848 (1984), and the controversy is whether the text, which immunizes the United States from tort suits for claims that it describes, describes only claims arising from the act of detention, i.e. the seizure of the goods or merchandise, or whether it also covers claims arising from the state of detention, e.g. damage sustained while the goods or merchandise are in the government's storage warehouses. At least, I think that's what the dispute is - it's kind of hard to understand, and both Justice Marshall's majority opinion and Justice Stevens' dissents focus on the words arising in respect of rather than detention.
It has been suggested that there should be canons of drafting legislation to parallel canons of interpretation. Here's my prescription for drafters: Mind your Eds and your Ings! Or for the more formally inclined: Mind your participles and your gerunds!
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* His real name is Brian Polis
Monday, February 25, 2008
One of these days
Occasionally I'm struck by an ambiguity that's so tasty, it can only be described as geschmak. A classic example is the title of a piece of spam e-mail that I once received: "Attract men with bigger breasts."
Another one comes from Neil Young's song One of These Days, in which the singer describes a letter he's going to write. The chorus goes:
The conjunct "and it won't be long" creates an ambiguity that can serve as a cautionary example for drafters of legal language. The more obvious interpretation is to understand it as pleonastic*, and the conjunct as a whole being shorthand for "and it won't be long before I do what I just described." But it can also be a pronoun which refers back to the letter, in which case the conjunct is saying that the letter won't be long.
The words are disambiguated, of course, by the fact that that the letter is earlier characterized as "a long letter." To avoid contradiction, the conjunct would have to be interpreted as referring to the length of time before the singer writes the letter. It's interesting that the presence of the contradiction doesn't make the sentence unambiguous to begin with, but rather makes it ambiguous between a sensible and a contradictory reading. Reminds me of Bertrand Russell's famous touchy yacht owner example.
The lesson for drafters: look out for ambiguities at a distance! Pronouns inside coordinated structures (those with and, or, and similar words) are dangerous, because pronouns are typically flexible enough that they can pick among antecedents, and coordination is flexible enough to pick among different-sized coordinated phrases. It and there, which can be either pronominal or pleonastic, add yet more flexibility. And when you're drafting, you want rigid rather than flexible words.
________________
* The word "pleonastic" should not be spoonerized.
Another one comes from Neil Young's song One of These Days, in which the singer describes a letter he's going to write. The chorus goes:
One of these days,
I'm gonna sit down and write a long letter
To all the good friends I've known
One of these days, one of these days, one of these days,
And it won't be long, it won't be long.
The conjunct "and it won't be long" creates an ambiguity that can serve as a cautionary example for drafters of legal language. The more obvious interpretation is to understand it as pleonastic*, and the conjunct as a whole being shorthand for "and it won't be long before I do what I just described." But it can also be a pronoun which refers back to the letter, in which case the conjunct is saying that the letter won't be long.
The words are disambiguated, of course, by the fact that that the letter is earlier characterized as "a long letter." To avoid contradiction, the conjunct would have to be interpreted as referring to the length of time before the singer writes the letter. It's interesting that the presence of the contradiction doesn't make the sentence unambiguous to begin with, but rather makes it ambiguous between a sensible and a contradictory reading. Reminds me of Bertrand Russell's famous touchy yacht owner example.
The lesson for drafters: look out for ambiguities at a distance! Pronouns inside coordinated structures (those with and, or, and similar words) are dangerous, because pronouns are typically flexible enough that they can pick among antecedents, and coordination is flexible enough to pick among different-sized coordinated phrases. It and there, which can be either pronominal or pleonastic, add yet more flexibility. And when you're drafting, you want rigid rather than flexible words.
________________
* The word "pleonastic" should not be spoonerized.
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