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There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities
by tmalsburg2 11y ago
There is a reason why human languages evolved to have syntactic ambiguity: better throughput. Psycholinguistic research is obsessed with syntactic ambiguities (and there are good reasons for that) but in real life these ambiguities are pretty much always resolved by other sources of information: context, prosody, world-knowledge, social cues. If you disambiguate a language on the syntaxtic level you're basically just adding excessive redundancy. There are special niches where disambiguating information is scarce or where any misinterpretation could have catastophic consequences (e.g., aviation handbooks) but outside these domains the absence of syntactic ambiguity is hardly a desirable property.
- digi_owl 11y agoInternational diplomacy?
- tmalsburg2 11y agoThere you can always ask for clarification. I'm not aware of any war that has been started because of a syntactic ambiguity. But when your plane is about to crash or when your nuclear reactor is threatening to melt down, you may not be able to get a clarification.
- baddox 11y agoI don't think that syntactic ambiguity is particularly crucial to throughput. There is still plenty of semantic ambiguity possible in Lojban, and from what I have seen Lojban doesn't seem to have particularly lower throughput than natural languages.