Lexical Disambiguation: A Linguistic And Cognitive Approach

Disambiguation is the most important process in the language comprehension, and lexical ambiguity is the commonest type which leads to the ambiguous understanding of an utterance. In this thesis, the lexical disambiguation was not only defined within the traditional dictionary-based selection of the senses, but also includes the nonce disambiguation in a certain context of any lexical item which has related or unrelated multiple senses. This thesis tries to clarify how lexical disambiguation is achieved automatically in human mind in the framework of cognitive semantics and cognitive pragmatics. The research is mainly focused on the linguistic exploration of the lexical disambiguation, distinctive from the empirical NLP-WSD (natural language processing word sense disambiguation) research in the AI sciences. Chapter One introduces the traditional concept of lexical ambiguity, together with its classification and resolution, especially the potential ambiguity underlying polysemy and homonymy; Chapter Two is a survey of lexical disambiguation in various domains; in Chapter Three, the lexical disambiguation is studied in the framework of cognitive linguistics, and the author tries to clarify the mental mechanism of lexical disambiguation. The whole chapter is unfolded surrounding the spread activation of frames, mental space building, and the priming and pruning mechanism. Semantic garden-path effect, being a by-product of semantic priming and pruning, is illustrated with some examples in this chapter. Chapter Four provides a relevance theoretical account for human disambiguation from the aspects of intention recognition, relevance expectation and processing effort. Relevance theory assumes that every utterance has a variety of possible interpretations compatible with the linguistically encoded information, that is to say, relevance theorists view ambiguity as the inherent nature of language and regard disambiguation as a major task in language comprehension; despite all the above cognitive mechanism, there still exists failure of lexical disambiguation in verbal communication, and such failure is analyzed briefly in Chapter Five; in the last chapter, the cognition-based study of lexical disambiguation is summarized and the original findings of this research are iterated.