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The translator’s sensitivity to syntactic ambiguity—a psycholinguistics experiment*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 June 2016

Elyse Piquette
Elyse Piquette*
Affiliation:
McGill University
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Extract

Transformational grammar has attempted to outline the systematic nature of language structure while also stressing the creative aspect of language. Language is systematic in that speakers use a finite number of means to make up their messages, and yet it is creative in that there are an infinite number of individual different messages which are possible in any natural language. In natural languages, however, there is not a perfect one-to-one correspondence between possible messages—intended or perceived—and possible linguistic realizations, as there exists in conventional or artificial languages. Often it is found in natural languages that a single linguistic form may have two or more meanings. Homonymy, whether it is lexical or syntactic, is an important notion, not only because syntactic ambiguity plays a central role in linguistic theory, but also because its study gives us a better understanding of the systematics of language and of the way we attach meaning to linguistic representations. Hence, the importance of evaluating how speakers deal with syntactic ambiguity in their attempts to understand and to be understood.

Type
Research Article
Information
Canadian Journal of Linguistics/Revue canadienne de linguistique , Volume 21 , Issue 1 , Spring 1976 , pp. 95 - 106
Copyright
Copyright © Canadian Linguistic Association 1976

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Footnotes

*

A substantially similar version of this paper was presented bilingually under the title ‘The translator’s sensitivity to syntactic ambiguity—L’aptitude du traducteur à déceler l’ambiguïté syntaxique’ to the 1975 Annual Meeting of the Canadian Linguistic Association in Edmonton, Alberta. I am very grateful to Wm. J. Baker and Gary D. Prideaux for computerizing part of the data, and to them both as well as to G. Richard Tucker, Robert Sarrasin, and Brian Harris for valuable comments and criticism at various stages of this study. This research was carried out with the help of doctoral fellowships from the Canada Council and the Quebec Department of Education (Direction générale de l’Enseignement supérieur) for 1974-75, and the generous collaboration of the Notre Dame Secretarial School in Montreal.

References

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