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Translation solutions for dealing with ambiguity in Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. This paper shows how different types of ambiguity embedded in the matrix of Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (the 1993 edition) are dealt with in two prestigious Romanian translations – Frida Papadache’s Peripeţiile Alisei în Ţara Minunilor (1976) and Antoaneta Ralian’s Alice în Ţara Minunilor (2007) – as a tribute to the international appeal of Alice. My focal aim is to present a comparative analysis of the methods employed in translating Carroll’s equivocal lexical items, which make it increasingly difficult to match grammatical categories with function. This paper also aims at describing disambiguation techniques applied primarily in determining if the two translators managed to reinforce the original textual leeway at their disposal in the pure spirit of Carroll. My analysis relies heavily on Dirk Delabastita’s translation strategies as precautionary measures to cope with Carroll’s specialized type of literary discourse. The findings submitted by this paper are consistent with the idea that translating Carroll’s craft unavoidably entails a partial loss of meaning, brought about by the yawning gap between the intended message and interpretation, which can result in either overtranslation or undertranslation. The extensive use of double-entendre in the source-text cannot be recoded entirely in the target language, despite the translators’ excellent command of English. Article history: Received 8 June 2022; Revised 21 November 2022; Accepted 25 November 2022; Available online 20 December 2022; Available print 30 December 2022. REZUMAT. Soluții de traducere a ambiguității din Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Acest articol arată că modul în care diferitele tipuri de ambiguitate încadrate în matricea textuală a lui Lewis Carroll în Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (ediția din 1993) sunt tratate în două traduceri românești de vază – Peripețiile Alisei în Țara Minunilor (1976), tradusă de Frida Papadache, și Alice în Țara Minunilor (2007), tradusă de Antoaneta Ralian – aduce un omagiu notorietății internaționale de care se bucură Alice. Scopul acestui articol este să prezinte o analiză comparativă a metodelor alese în traducerea termenilor echivoci care împiedică formarea corespondenței formă-funcție. Un alt obiectiv rezidă în descrierea tehnicilor de dezambiguizare aplicate pentru a determina în ce măsură traducătoarele au împrumutat, în manieră carrolliană, atmosfera lingvistică a textului-sursă, având în vedere strategiile de traducere propuse de Dirk Delabastita ca măsuri de precauție în explorarea discursului specializat al lui Carroll. Constatările acestei lucrări arată că încercarea de a-l traduce pe Carroll inevitabil implică omisiuni lexicale cauzate de distanța mare dintre mesajul scriptic livrat de autor și interpretarea ulterioară. Aceasta duce, în cele din urmă, fie la supratraducere, fie la subtraducere. Folosirea deasă a calamburului în textul-sursă nu poate fi oglindită integral în textul-țintă, în ciuda nivelului excelent de limbă engleză deținut de cele două traducătoare. Termeni-cheie: umor carrollian; ambiguitate; soluții de traducere; tehnici de dezambiguizare; provocări textuale

The goal of this paper is to introduce and elucidate the concept of “productive ambiguity” for the study of Homeric poetry and other literary texts. After the introduction, I present a theoretical elucidation of the concept, starting from a general notion of ambiguity and identifying three features of productive ambiguity: its irresolvable character (no alternative can be ruled out on textual or linguistic grounds), its persistence (both alternatives are appropriate to the context and contribute to the interpretation of the text), and its productivity (the ambiguity itself contributes to the interpretation of the text). In the third section, I analyze four passages from Iliad 2: 2.73, 285, 340-9, and 807, studying in each the source of the ambiguity and demonstrating that it fulfills the three features to be considered productive.

This study deals with the linguistics and poetics of the translation of “The Twelve” by Alexander Blok, a leading poet of the Russian “Silver age” concerning three levels of analysis :a) lexical-grammatical challenges of translating, b) challenges of translating poetical pictures (and poetics of headlines in the original and the translation), c) phonical-rhytmical challenges of translating. Taking into account the fact that the headline “Двенадцать“ in the Russian original has three levels of meaning, thematical “twelve people “, genre-compositional “twelve poems” and cultural-historical “twelve hours of the old world,” the only lexeme adequate to Serbian translation is the lexeme “дванаест” in a headline and it has to be used as a leit-motiv in three lines of the three poems of the epic. A special aspect of the study is represented by the explanation of the new recension of the Serbian translation of the poem “The Twelve”, with a grapheme “yat” (ѣ), that can be read in ekavian and yekavian dialects (with a monosyllabic reflex of a long yat pointing to the preceding apostrophy).

In this work, addressing, from a semantic point of view, these two types of anaphoric markers is not irrelevant. Indeed, who prepositional and the pronoun adverbial present certain divergences in their functioning referential in classical French as opposed to modern French. These two pronouns, in their anaphoric sense, enjoy a great freedom related to their ability to reclaim interchangeably from [human] or [non-human] backgrounds. This freedom, dating from the ancient language, is in force throughout the seventeenth century. Which prepositional refers throughout the century to [non-human], y anaphorise a antecedent having the semantic trait [human]. In modern French, these two pronouns are categorized as referring to the [human]. However, the deviation of the standard persists and we encounter cases reminiscent of the old language. Based on these different findings, we will try in this contribution to study the referential functioning of pronouns that prepositional and y and to demonstrate that the indetermination that governs their semantic functioning is source Referential ambiguity, essentially in the case of competition between several antecedents present for the same term of recovery.

This article deals with phrases introduced by an adjective (which may or may not be preceded by as or so), followed by as used as the subordinator of a finite clause constituted by a subject along with copular be (hereinafter referred to as “adj. + as”): short and stout as she was, that was the highest bit she could reach. The ambivalent link between “adj. + as” and the main clause deserves special attention, as it can be interpreted either in terms of a cause and effect relationship or of concession (paradoxical relationship); more importantly, the study of a corpus of about 240 examples (mostly sampled from the “Corpus of Contemporary American English” – COCA) confirms the intuition according to which the paradoxical interpretation of the relationship between the two clauses is overwhelmingly more frequent than the causal one (by a proportion of about ten to one in my corpus). The fronting of the adjective indicates that the adjective possesses a high degree of a certain quality, thus paving the way for a paradoxical interpretation, as this is often a subjective, non neutral, view of things. “Adj. + as” clauses may turn out to be ambiguous even in the presence of a main clause. It is doubtful, however, that “adj. + as” can merge both the logical and the paradoxical interpretations in its relation to the main clause, as they are too diametrically opposed from a semantic point of view to be able to combine coherently with each other within the same clause.

Pronominal reference always constituted one of the most notable features of the language of the XVIIth century. Studies on pronouns anaphoric representatives concern principally the report which joins the anaphoric with its contextual antecedent. This report is not always easy to establish given that in some situations ambiguous the unification of anaphoric pronominal expression with the aimed, present antecedent in immediate linguistic context, poses problem and intervenes directly on the intelligibility of swording and on the coherence of the whole text. It is especially in this sense that will articulate our job concerning the referential functioning of pronouns there and there in French classic. We will try to show that these two pronouns, in their anaphoric acceptation, avoid the categorisation at which remarqueurs aims at instituting within the usage limiting their rather free referential functioning. In other words, we will show that the categorisation of pronouns anaphoriques adverbial there and there, who according to the rules established have to consult the inanimate exclusively, am not applied in the usage and which these two pronouns return indifferently to an antecedent having semantic feature [Human being] or [Non-human being]. This opposition governing the referential functioning of the majority of the pronouns anaphoric, between others terms there qu-, confers on these two pronouns a specific functional feature within the classical texts. Our purpose, in this job, will consist in proving that the transgression of the linguistic rule, supposed to regulate the referential functioning free from adverbial pronouns there and there, institutes diversions unduly in usage and conflicts as for the referential interpretation of the report anaphoric joining pronoun and antecedent.

The purpose of this paper is to focuse the analysis on the questions of Law occurring in the Tristan of Béroul ; more precisely, to consider the relations between the feudal pact, the honour code and the procedure of justice. The author is actually playing on several registers, a proof of his knowledge of the practice of justice in the courts of his time, the consequence of that play being an interrogation on the validity of the proof, the oath and more generally on the ambiguity of the Law.

The article considers such peculiarities of the controlled languages as the choice of lexical units and constraints on their syntax. We review various difficulties that arise during the selection of forms we would like to put in the lexicon of a controlled language. We compare the index of multiple meanings of the words used to form the vocabulary of a controlled language before and after the lexical control and calculate the change in the ambiguity rate of sentences due to the elimination of polysemy. The words allowed in the lexicon of a controlled language usually have a high polysemy index in the standard language. This is evident especially as far as grammatical and non-technical words are concerned. In contrast, technical terms are much more often monosemic. Thus the observation of the “one token = one meaning” principle in the lexicon for the controlled language has a great effect on the decline of ambiguity.

In this paper, I analysed the interaction between the French adjective “gros” and -eur deverbal nouns. This adjective gives rise to a preferred non-intersective reading when it is in a prenominal position, but only an intersective reading when it appears after the noun. I claim that it is necessary to take into account both the semantics of the adjective and the semantics of the noun to account for the ambiguity present at the DP-level (a “blame both” analysis). An abstract operator, eur, is always present within deverbal nouns such as “fumeur” (“smoker”), and is partially responsible for the interpretation of the DP: if the adjective is within the scope of this operator, the DP will assume a non-intersective reading, whereas when it is outside of its scope, the DP bears an intersective interpretation. The adjective “gros” itself actually has two semantic values: one modifies the event argument present in deverbal nouns, and the other modifies the individual argument of the noun (the agent of the verbal root).

The work on the textual organization (Apotheloz, 1995; Grobet, 2000; Combettes, 1986) have demonstrated the great importance that played the management of pronouns anaphoric in structuring textual. However, some attachments repositories are far away to comply with such a requirement and have the more often an influence of a side, on the organization of informational text and of the other, on its thematic progression. Let us note, from this same point of view, as the problems relating to the resolution of the pronominal anaphora, as regards the attachment repository of the pronoun anaphoric blizzard to the antecedent, are one of the most salient features of the classical language. The grammarians of this period work, essentially, on the eviction of equivocal order repository. The latter are likely to generate different interpretations often of the same report anaphoric blizzard. However, despite the established rules throughout the XVIIth century, aimed at restricting the use of free pronouns anaphoric, the management of these terms of resumption is the more often the source of referential ambiguities. These referential ambiguities constitute a side, one of the major obstacles to the reading of classic texts and on the other, are sources of textual inconsistency. In this sense, some reports anaphoric remain difficult to interpret because several history are presented as potential candidates for the same anaphoric pronoun. To resolve this type of equivocation, the conventional grammarians erected as the sole criterion for selection, the principle of proximity. This principle is to reattach the pronoun anaphoric to the closest referent in the left context. However, this criterion has proved, in some cases, unreliable in the measure or the referents competitors, present in the same statement, can, also, claim the role of antecedent while introducing a degree of referential accessibility high. On the basis of these different findings, we will try to look at the operation of the repository anaphoric pronouns from examples attested learned of various classical works. Our objective is also to demonstrate that the referential interpretation of these reports anaphoric within classical texts poses problems for the modern reader. In this same vein, we will try, first of all, to put the emphasis on the problems relating to the location of the referent of a pronoun anaphoric blizzard in a classical French and then, we will propose, based on different theoretical approaches presented respectively by (Keenan and Comrie (1977, 1979, 1981), Ariel (1988, 1990, 2001), Chafe (1987, 1994)), a classification of referents competitors according to their degree of referential accessibility. This referential classification will allow the resolution of reports anaphoric during a referential ambiguity. The application of the various factors of the referential accessibility on reports anaphoric ambiguous has proved of great importance to the extent or their application referentially indeterminate situations guide, generally, to the proper reference. Our results seem to confirm that the noun anaphora is not considered solely as a phenomenon dependent on its context and as a problem to be solved, but rather as a process of cognitive management of the dynamic discursive. Because of this, the management of pronouns anaphoric in the framework of a discursive situation fact appeal to different interpretative process to the time cognitive and syntactic. In this same perspective, the application of theories of the accessibility, presented respectively by Ariel (1988, 1990, 2001), Keenan and Comrie (1977, 1979, 1981) and Chafe (1987, 1994), has allowed, in the framework of a referential competition, to classify referents according to their degree of referential accessibility. Several factors are involved, as well, in the process of benchmarking, and allow a hand to resolve the ambiguity in referential linking the pronoun anaphoric blizzard to the antecedent adequate and on the other to establish a prioritization at the level of the degree of accessibility of referents placed in competition. These are classes in referents having a strong referential accessibility, referents enjoying a referential accessibility average and referents having a low referential accessibility. This referential classification duct in the majority of cases to the allocation of a unique reference restricting, as well, the preferences of attachment repository.

Neste estudo se investiga o apagamento da preposição diante do pronome relativo entre falantes de português do extremo sul do Brasil e Norte do Uruguai; os resultados são comparados a dados do português europeu. Os material utilizado é todo de língua falada: dois estilos do projeto ADDU-Atlas Lingüístico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (pergunta-resposta e conversa livre), cinco entrevistas do Projeto NURC-Norma Urbana Culta) Porto Alegre), além de entrevistas do projeto Português Fundamental, do português europeu. A análise das amostras sugere que a tendência de apagar a preposição diante do pronome relativo, comum no PB, no espanhol e no italiano, não é tão freqüente no PE, em que, até mesmo nas circunstâncias de tempo e lugar, a preposição em é mantida. Observou-se também que, tanto no Potuguês Brasileiro quanto no Europeu é comum o uso do relativo que para substituir um constituinte preposicionado para esquivar-se da construção de uma relativa complexa.This study investigates the deletion of the preposition that precedes the relative pronoun by Portuguese speakers of the south of Brazil and the north of Uruguay; the results are compared to data of European Portuguese. The material used is entirely of the spoken language: two styles taken from the project called ADDU-Atlas Lingüístico Diatópico y Diastrático del Uruguay (questions and answers, and free conversation), five interviews taken from the project known as NURC (Standard spoken language), in addition to interviews from the project called Português Fundamental (or Basic Portuguese spoken in Portugal). The analysis of the samples suggests that the tendency to delete the preposition ahead of the relative pronoun, common in Brazilian Portuguese, Spanish and Italian, is not so frequent in European Portuguese, where, even in the circumstances of time and space, the preposition in is preserved. It was also noticed that in both Portuguese varieties the use of the relative pronoun that is frequently used to replace a propositioned constituent to avoid the construction of a complex relative clause.

This article is part of a larger study aiming at showing that Sanskrit poems with multiple meanings, far from being obscure or utterly difficult to understand were quite an important and appreciated genre of Indian literature. The understanding of such poems was based upon common literary practices, shared by poets and readers and the latter were perfectly able to decipher the various meanings because they were at the same time aware of the rules of the work they were going to read and duly informed of the different stories it referred to. Focusing on one famous double meaning poem, the Rāghavapāṇḍavīya, "Story of the Scion of Raghu and the Sons of Pāṇḍu", composed by Kavirāja around 1175 AD and summarising the two major epics of India, the Rāmāyaṇa and the Mahābhārata, through the very same words. Two aspects of the method the poet has recourse to in order to facilitate his work's understanding, both in the very beginning of it, will be analysed. The first consists in the introductory statement, quite explicit and many times repeated, that the poem conveys two meanings and that these two meanings are the story of Rāma and that of the sons of Pāṇḍu. The second consists in a kind of short treatise of poetics displayed in two stanzas of the poem's first chapter, from which the readers may learn some of the poetical and linguistic devices by which two meanings may be conveyed at the same time: inversion of the qualifying property and the qualified object, inversion of the subject and the object of comparison, double segmentation of the same phrase and use of polysemic words. Each device will be closely analysed, examples will be given and commented on. Of course, other factors contribute to the understanding of poems with multiple meanings, which will be dealt with in another more extensive study.

To obtain a joke with homophonic resources requires that ambiguity is perceived in the mind of the person you are speaking to. Therefore you bind him/her to choose one of the two (or more) potential meanings, and he/she is responsible for the – right or wrong – choice he/she makes. Three main rules explain the high number of sentences containing homophonies in French: the end of a word moves according to the syllabic structure of its environment; written -e-; low or high number of syllables of prosodic groups. I analyse different cases where homophony may occur – daily life, playing time, gender, age, job, leisure, cultural activities, place of birth, etc. – to attempt to give responses to the following questions : Since when, where, when, who, for whom is it realized ? What are the means taken by speakers to 'make' them, and for what purposes? For the speakers, what are the differences – if there are – between deliberate homophonies and unintentional ones?

Polysemy appears to be an artefact of traditional ontology in the philosophy of language. To reconsider it, we must dethrone the concept of the single sign and uphold the interpretative perspective. By analyzing the semantic liberation of set expressions in context, we can examine the variety of interpretative paths that establish or promote ambiguous meanings. Interpretative semantics thus significantly limits the issue of polysemy, and without pretending to resolve it, helps to dissolve it by revealing why it is poorly expressed.

A typical problem in the resolution of pronominal anaphora is the presence of more than one candidate for the antecedent of the pronoun. Considering two English sentences like (1) "People buy expensive cars because they offer more status" and (2) "People buy expensive cars because they want more status" we can see that the two NPs "people" and "expensive cars", from a purely syntactic perspective, are both legitimate candidates as antecedents for the pronoun "they". This problem has been traditionally solved by using world knowledge (e.g. schema theory), where, through an internal representation of the world, we "know" that cars "offer" status and people "want" status. The assumption in this paper is that the use of world knowledge does not explain how the disambiguation process works and alternative explanations should be explored. Using a knowledge poor approach (explicit information from the text rather than implicit world knowledge) the study investigates to what extent syntactic and semantic constraints can be used to resolve anaphora. For this purpose, 1,400 examples of the word "they" were randomly selected from a corpus of 10,000,000 words of expository text in English. Antecedent candidates for each case were then analyzed and classified in terms of their syntactic functions in the sentence (subject, object, etc.) and semantic features (+ human, + animate, etc.). It was found that syntactic constraints resolved 85% of the cases. When combined with semantic constraints the resolution rate rose to 98%. The implications of the findings for Natural Language Processing are discussed.

O presente trabalho almeja expor o fenômeno da homonímia no português do Brasil, enquanto ambigüidade presente em uma língua natural, por meio de uma revisitação teórica em diversos autores e em confronto com a polissemia. Ademais, pretende-se, além de redefinir conceitualmente a homonímia, propor critérios semânticos distintivos para esse fenômeno lingüístico, tais como a análise sêmica, o campo léxico, o uso de expressões cristalizadas e a ocorrência de traços especificadores.This paper is an attempt to describe and to discuss phenomenon of homonymy in Brazilian Portuguese as an ambiguity present in a natural language, by means of a theoretical revisitation to several authors and in confrontation with polisemy. It is also intended, besides conceptually redefining homonymy, to propose distinctive semantic criteria for this linguistic phenomenon, such as the semic analysis, the field lexicon, the use of crystallized expressions and the occurrence of specify features.

With respect to discourse organization, the most basic way of signaling the speaker’s or writer’s intentions is to use explicit lexical markers: so-called discourse markers or discourse connectives. While a lexicon of discourse connectives associated with the relations they express can be very useful for researchers, especially in Natural Language Processing, few projects aim at collecting them exhaustively, and only in a small number of languages. We present LEXCONN, a French lexicon of 328 discourse connectives, collected with their syntactic categories and the discourse relations they convey, and the methodology followed to build this resource. The lexicon has been constructed manually, applying systematic connective and relation identification criteria, using the FRANTEXT corpus as empirical support. Each connective has been associated to a relation within the framework of Segmented Discourse Representation Theory. We make a case for a few refinements in the theory, based on cases where no existing relation seemed to match a connective’s usage.

Abstract: The main purpose of this article is to make a comparative analysis of the structural and the lexical differences between coinage and transliteration, as methods for the acquisition of foreign natural sci-ence and technology lexical items, which are meant for inclusion in the Sesotho sa Leboa comprehensive monolingual dictionary, Pukuntšutlhaloši ya Sesotho sa Leboa. With the exception of the multilingual glossaries ('dictionaries' as they are called), which are compiled by the National Language Service of the Department of Arts and Culture, the Sesotho sa Leboa National Lexicography Unit does not at present have any monolin-gual dictionary specializing in specific subjects like natural science and technology. As a start, the Lexicogra-phy Unit decided to include this specialized terminology in the second edition of its comprehensive monolin-gual dictionary. The main purpose for lemmatizing the natural science and technology terminology is to give these lexical items comprehensive definitions in Sesotho sa Leboa, instead of 'a one word translation defini-tion' as is the case in the bilingual and multilingual dictionaries.Keywords: TRANSLITERATION, COINAGE, COINED LEXICAL ITEM, LOAN WORD, ADOPTIVE, FOREIGN WORD, LEXICOGRAPHY, SOTHOIZED WORD, INDIGENOUS WORD, NATURAL SCIENCE, TECHNOLOGY, COMPOUND WORD, AMBIGUITYOpsomming: Natuurwetenskaplike en tegnologiese terminologie in die Sesotho sa Leboa eentalige woordeboek. Die hoofdoel van hierdie artikel is om 'n ver-gelykende ontleding te maak van die strukturele en die leksikale verskille tussen nuutskepping en transliterasie as metodes vir die verwerwing van vreemde natuurwetenskaplike en tegnologiese leksikale items wat bedoel is vir insluiting in die Sesotho sa Leboa omvattende eentalige woorde-boek Pukuntšutlhaloši ya Sesotho sa Leboa. Met die uitsondering van die meertalige woordelyste ("woordeboeke" soos hulle genoem word) wat deur die Nasionale Taaldiens van die Departement Kuns en Kultuur saamgestel word, het die Sesotho sa Leboa Nasionale Leksikografie-eenheid op die oomblik geen eentalige woordeboek wat spesialiseer in spesifieke onderwerpe soos die natuurwetenskap en tegnologie nie. As 'n begin het die Leksikografie-eenheid besluit om hierdie gespesialiseerde terminologie in die tweede uitgawe van sy omvattende eentalige woordeboek in te sluit. Die hoofdoel vir die lemmatisering van hierdie natuurwetenskaplike en tegnologiese terminologie is om hierdie leksikale items omvattende definisies in Sesotho sa Leboa te gee in plaas van " 'n eenwoordvertalingdefinisie" soos die geval is in die tweetalige en meertalige woordeboeke.Sleutelwoorde: TRANSLITERASIE, NUUTSKEPPING, NUUTGESKEPTE LEKSIKALE ITEM, LEENWOORD, ONTLENING, VREEMDE WOORD, LEKSIKOGRAFIE, VERSOTHODE WOORD, INHEEMSE WOORD, NATUURWETENSKAP, TEGNOLOGIE, SAMESTELLING, DUBBELSINNIGHEID

The major features of Johannes Clauberg's hermeneutics are examined in this paper, as they appear in the very structure of one of his major works, the Logica Vetus et Nova, and particularly in the pattern of analysis provided by this work when it comes to interpret an " obscure sentence ". Clauberg looks for the roots of ambiguity and obscurity rather in the words themselves than in their syntactic combinations; because - that's the conclusion we intend to draw - of his conception of the relation between language and thought. For Clauberg, language and thought are too identical in their structures for a major discrepancy to occur between them.