As I regularly point out on this blog: if you look for it, ambiguity is everywhere; almost any expression can be understood in multiple ways, especially if you’re willing to entertain preposterous or unlikely ideas. So if you had a device that detects every possible ambiguity, it would be ringing forever and driving everyone crazy.
People typically fail to notice most of the possibilities, and then disregard the unlikely ones they do entertain (there’s evidence that most people hearing the word straw entertain, for a fleeting moment, both the interpretations ‘dried stalk of grain’ and ‘hollow tube for sucking a drink’ — even in The straw was mixed with hay and The straw was fabricated from plastic). So most ambiguity lies beneath the level of consciousness.
But some people have become accustomed to listening to and looking for details of language use — it’s one of the things they do — and so are inclined to have over-sensitive ambiguity alarms. Their ambiguity alarms are as a kind of occupational hazard. I am such a person, by profession. I have had to learn to suppress commentary on much of what I notice, because the details aren’t important for most people, though occasionally I’ll cite something that entertains me.
My friend Tim Evanson is also such a person, and since he’s a prodigious writer on Facebook, we get to see his ambiguity alarm in action. On 4/13, he citex a headline from Crain’s Cleveland Business:
CFO [is] named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (call this CCB)
And then quipped:
So, I have an etiquette question: Do we refer to her as “Ms. Trailhead”? Or as “Ms. Akron Trailhead”?
CCB is in fact ambigous. The intended reading, indeed the only one that makes sense, is paraphrased by:
CFO for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation [is] named (CCB-1)
This meaning is made clear by the subhead that follows CCB (printed here as a single line) and provides further details:
Trailhead Community Health Foundation of Greater Akron names Eustacia Netzel-Hatcher as its chief financial officer
The silly reading, the one TE mocks, is paraphrased by:
CFO [is] named after Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (CCB-2)
Well, TE’s over-senstive ambiguity alarm provides us all with a moment of entertainment; CCB-2 is preposterous — positing a Chief Financial Officer whose parents chose to give her, as her personal name, the title of a foundation. Along the lines of the giggly:
This is my wife, John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation Zwicky; she comes from a long line of copper mines
The two readings. On to the syntactic and lexicographic details.
CCB-1: the phrasal verb name for. From NOAD:
phrasal verb name after (also North American name for (name someone or something after someone or something) call someone or something by the same name as another person or thing
From my 8/15/22 posting “Fame-naming and family history”, details about:
(passive) X be named N after / for Y (I was named Arnold after / for my father)
(active) Z name X N after / for Y (My parents named me Arnold after / for my father)
CCB-2: extraposition from NP. In combination with the phrasal verb name for. About extraposition from NP:
— formulated as a process: a postnominal modifier phrase (especially if it’s “heavy”) can be extraposed to clause-final position
— formulated as a static relationship: there’s a class of (phrasal) nominal modifiers (especially if they’re “heavy” ones) with two possible orderings: (1) within a NP, after the head N (the default location); or (2) at the end of the clause
Examples of the resulting alternations (with the extraposed material underlined):
Someone that I ddn’t know came ~ Someone came that I didn’t know
Three people with disabiities were there ~ Three people were there with disabilities
CFO for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation (is) named ~ CFO (is) named for Akron’s Trailhead Foundation
Voilà!
April 17, 2026 at 11:51 am |
Just a note to say that this little posting took me 5 hours to put together and polish. Starting with a 2-line jotting of crucial stuff. The work was in setting things up for my audience and not assuming too much technical knowledge or going into more detail than necessary.
Ann Daingerfield Zwicky used to maintain that teaching was the art of telling useful half-truths.
April 17, 2026 at 12:05 pm |
I have always been fascinated by linguistics as seen from a high overview (or high-school) level. I know that I have little to no idea of what is going on either under the wider scope that I am more or less aware of under the umbrella of “linguistics,” or down in the details of its many specialty areas; but most of the time you provide enough background, as you did today, that I can understand your discussion and how it applies to my understanding of language. I just want to let you know my appreciation of your method and the work I know you put into it
April 17, 2026 at 12:13 pm
Wow. Thank you.