Written by Olga Donskaia

So you think you “know” English… You can speak, you can read… But do you know what makes your words either clear or ambiguous? Where to draw the line between a funny joke and utter nonsense? Linguists do know. And they have their fun!

On 26 September, Anglistikos Akademija invited the students from Simonas Daukantas Gymnasium to participate in short seminars in literature and linguistics. During her presentation ‘Double Meaning: The Fun Side of Language’, VU Associate Professor Dr Audronė Šolienė demonstrated how the knowledge of linguistics can be used practically. The students were encouraged to detect the sources of ambiguity in sentences and solve them by rephrasing or providing additional context.

The students were acquainted with scientific terms and acquired a practical skill of discriminating between lexical and syntactic (or structural) ambiguity.

‘A word is ambiguous when it has more than one interpretation. If we want to be more scientific, we can make things a bit more complicated and say that a sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more paraphrases which are not themselves paraphrases of each other,’ explained Dr Šolienė.

By using humorous and intuitively resolvable examples, Dr Šolienė demonstrated how various branches of linguistics, such as semantics, pragmatics, or phonetics, can be used in a meaningful and practically applicable way. To highlight the possible career paths for future linguists, the professor shared research topics from different linguistic fields as well as examples of syntactic tree diagrams, which are crucial for understanding syntactic processing in artificial intelligence.