Absence of Evidence for Underspecification in Prenominal Relative Clause Attachment

Traxler et al. (1998) have found that relative clauses with ambiguous attachment are sometimes read faster than their unambiguous counterparts. Two broad classes of theories account for this phenomenon: Race-based models posit that ambiguous sentences are read faster due to a ‘race’ between several permissible analyses of the sentence. In contrast, the strategic underspecification account maintains that, under the right conditions, readers underspecify ambiguities in order to save time. We show the two accounts make qualitatively different predictions for structures with prenominal relative clauses, such as in Turkish. While the underspecification account predicts an ambiguity in Turkish, race-based accounts predict the absence of such an effect. We present data from two reading experiments in Turkish in which we find no evidence for an ambiguity advantage in the processing of ambiguous sentences with prenominal relative clauses and argue that this finding poses a major challenge for the strategic underspecification account.

Linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian legal texts

In Russian legal texts there are many various language-based phenomena identified by lawyers as “cases of indeterminacy.” Looking at these phenomena from a linguistic point of view allows one to offer their meaningful classification. This article presents such a classification. It is based on the traditional distinction between ambiguity (we discuss only lexical, structural, and referential ambiguity) and vagueness, namely: vagueness in the narrow sense, fuzziness (we distinguish between referential fuzziness, classificatory fuzziness, and lexical fuzzy expressions including hedges, fuzzy quantifiers etc.), and lack of specification. In addition to the classification itself, the article provides some semantic tests and a variety of examples that illustrate the different types of ambiguity and vagueness, including those from Russian legal texts. We particularly argue that the cases of syntactic and referential ambiguity are periodically encountered in Russian language of law. Among them, for example, the cases of coordination ambiguity, the cases of relative clause attachment ambiguity and others. At the same time, the found examples of vagueness are expectedly much more numerous. The article aims to provide lawyers with tools for the systematic search and analysis of cases of linguistic ambiguity and vagueness in Russian texts.