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In a message dated 6/2/2002 12:20:39 PM Central Daylight Time, ram@hidden.email writes:Sapir said that all grammars leak. He was referring, of course, to But many have serious embolisms, particularly if intended for speech communities derived from native speakers of other languages. <However, a sentence that is unambiguous can still be vague. For example, if I say "I own a boat", I am NOT being ambiguous, but I AM being vague because I'm not saying which boat I own. If I say "Every man owns a boat", I am NOT being ambiguous but I AM being vague because I'm not specifying which boat is owned by each man.> This is very odd. Vagueness is very context sensitive -- it is vague if it is less precise than the context (speaker -hearer cooperation) calls for. Out of the blue -- and in most contexts -- neither of these sentences is vague, though it is easy to imagine one in which the first -- and with more difficulty, the second -- would be vague ("Do you own the cigarette that ran the Garda last night?", say, for the first.) The second sentence is also notoriously ambiguous in English, although I think it rarely fools anyone. To call a sentence vague (or-- markedly worse -- to say that the speaker is being vague by using the sentence) because there is a context (though it is not this one) in which it is vague seems to lead to an impossible standard for language -- one which you almost reject later {"Of course, periphrasis can always be used to reduce or eliminate vagueness, but this should not be a requirement of the grammar. Any language that claims to completely lack vagueness will be so verbose and complex that it will be useless (assuming it's even possible to create such a monster)."), failing only by allowing that elimination of all vagueness is a possibility. It is not, even in simple cases like linear measurements (what's precise in nanometres is vague in picometres). |