Lexical Ambiguity as a Touchstone for Theories of Language Analysis

This paper assesses several broad approaches to language analysis with respect to the problem of lexical ambiguity. The impact of the problem on both syntactic and semantic analysis is discussed, and several common methods for disambiguation, including the use of selectional restrictions and scriptal lexicons, are analyzed. Their shortcomings illustrate the need for complex inference to resolve ambiguity, which forms one of the key functional arguments in favor of integrating language analysis with memory and inference. However, it has proven surprisingly difficult to realize such an integrated approach in practice: An assessment of lexical disambiguation within some recent models which attempt to do so reveals that they rely largely on the traditional techniques of selectional restrictions and scriptal lexicons, with all their drawbacks. The difficulty is shown to stem primarily from the theories of memory and inferential processing utilized. The implications for recent approaches to language analysis based on connectionist mechanisms are explored. Finally, the requirements imposed by lexical disambiguation on theories of memory and inferential processing are discussed.