Structural Ambiguity

Words and phrases can often be ambiguous and hard to understand. Whether it be a text message, a newspaper headline, or an advertisement, ambiguous messages are commonly found and translational difficulties happen frequently. When language is ambiguous, it can be interpreted in more than one way and the true meaning isn’t always clear. There are three types of ambiguity that can cause these unclear messages and they can be structural, lexical, or semantic. When looking at newspaper headlines, I found one specifically that was unintentionally humorous and left me questioning the information presented. It read, “Miners Refuse to Work after Death”, which at first made me think “well…obviously”. However, the article’s true meaning was that a group of miners refused to work after one of their coworkers died in a dangerous mining accident. With ambiguous messages,

For this newspaper headline, we first comprehend the phrase as miners refusing to work after they are dead, which is comical because everyone stops working after they die. Once we reread the headline, we can understand that the miners are refusing to work after a coworker’s death and because they are avoiding danger. If this specific newspaper article was structured or captioned, “Miner’s Death Causes Others to Stop Working” or “Health Concern Causes Miners to Refuse Work”, it would give the reader a better understanding of what the article is about. Changing or adding a few words can help simplify complicated phrases. Next, there is lexical ambiguity, which is when a single word can have multiple meanings. In this example, we see the word “death” have two meanings. It can be interpreted as the death of another miner or that the miners refuse to work after they die themselves. It is hard to be sure on whose death is being mentioned in this newspaper headline, which is why it remains