[More theory-wrangling]
Craig,
I think all linguistic theories allow for structural
ambiguity – e.g., for a
sentence such as “I saw the guy from the coffee shop,” which can be
read with the prepositional phrase modifying either “saw” or “guy,”
just about every theory of syntax will talk about the different readings as
being connected to different structures. However, a large
class of theories in what I’ll call the “American Formalist”
school don’t consider other kinds of ambiguity to be directly relevant
to discussions of syntax. Since they envisage syntax as a component or set of
components separate from semantics, any ambiguity that isn’t structural
isn’t directly relevant to it. And with cases of structural ambiguity,
most of those approaches will essentially hold that there are two sentences
that have the same surface manifestation – in other words structural
ambiguity is the syntactic equivalent of homonymy. A “multistructural”
theory, on the other hand, would allow for a *non*-ambiguous sentence having
multiple structures at the same time.
Optimality Theory, from Johanna’s description of it,
sounds like it allows multiple principles to compete to form one structural
representation. I don’t *think*
that’s a multistructural approach; it sounds
more like a kind of Darwinian monostructuralism.
Bill Spruiell
Dept. of English