Scopal Ambiguity: Messing With Words to Make Things Funny

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Remember how last week we said that another whole thing is different from a-whole-nother thing? This week we’re going to talk about sometime similar: Sometimes a sentence doesn’t quite end up where you were expecting. For example, a recent tweet by James Martin goes like this: 

A woman gives birth in the UK every 48 seconds. She must be exhausted.

The ordinary way to interpret this sentence is for a woman to mean a different woman each time, but sure enough, if you think about it for a second, it could also refer to the highly improbable scenario in which the same woman gives birth 1800 times per day. At the risk of spoiling the joke, let’s look at how it is that we can get two meanings out of this one sentence, a situation that linguists refer to as scopal ambiguity. 

The sentence “Everybody loves somebody” has two possible readings.

Let’s go for a slightly simpler sentence to make these two meanings more clear. The sentence Everybody loves somebody has two possible readings. In the first reading, it’s true about all people that each of them has some person who they love, but it’s not necessarily the same person. In the second reading, there is some particular person whom everyone loves. 

Another way of saying this is that in the first reading, we interpret the every as having scope over the some (for every person…there is some other person…) while in the second reading, we interpret the some as having scope over the every (there is some person…whom every other person…). 

Or in more simplified notation: 

• EVERY > SOME
• SOME > EVERY

So if we go back to the original sentence, we can see the same two readings going on. I’m going to paraphrase them to make it a little more obvious. 

A woman gives birth in every 48 seconds is essentially equivalent to Some woman gives birth every 48 seconds. The first, logical reading, where every has priority over some, means that for every period of 48 seconds, there is some woman who gives birth (although not necessarily the same ). The second, humorous reading, where some has priority over every, means that for some particular woman, she gives birth every 48 seconds. 

Scope Ambiguity Is Common in Humor

Exploiting scope ambiguity is actually a fairly common device in humor. Here’s another example from a recent conversation that  I had about the surprisingly dangerous skills of deer: 

Every year, somebody’s dog gets killed by a deer. It’s always the same person. She never learns. You just shouldn’t have a Chihuahua in Churchill, Manitoba

Wait, how many dog-owners are involved? How many dogs? Are the dogs coming back to life? Let’s paraphrase the sentence again. It will make it sound a bit awkward, but it will also be easiest to see what I’m getting at:

Every year, someone owns some dog and that dog is killed by some deer. 

Wow, that’s complicated. We’ve got one every (every year) and three somes (some owner, some dog, and some deer). Let’s break it down. First, the most logical meaning of the sentence, where owner, dog, and deer are all different (option #1) or even that the owner and dog are different but there’s a single predatory deer in the neighborhood (option #2). 

Whenever you have more than one quantifier in a sentence, you have the potential for their scopes to interact with each other in multiple ways.

Next, we have the still fairly plausible option that the same owner keeps buying new dogs (the owner is an ill-fated chihuahua aficionado) and each year the new dog undergoes a tragic deer-related incident, whether all perpetrated by the same deer (option #3) or by different deer (option #4). 

With less probability but with greater entertainment value comes the possibility that the same owner has one dog that keeps resurrecting itself every year only to meet the same untimely fate, whether by the same deer each year (option #5) or by a different deer (option #6). 

Lastly and perhaps most bizarrely, we have the option that there’s this one dog that keeps resurrecting itself but that it finds a new owner every year, whereupon it meets its demise, again either at the hooves of one particular deer (option #7) or various different deer (option #8). 

Whew! And we got all of these meanings from the same sentence: Every year, someone’s dog gets killed by a deer. You might need to pause and puzzle it through for a minute, but they’re all possible. 

What’s going on? Words like every and some, as well as others like a/an, a few, several, much, many, a lot of, most, any, each, all, and so on are known as quantifiers, and the relationship between them is known as scope. Whenever you have more than one quantifier in a sentence, you have the potential for their scopes to interact with each other in multiple ways, creating several different possible interpretations for the sentence, a phenomenon known as quantifier scope ambiguity (or more generally just scopal ambiguity). 

In most cases, we interpret potentially-ambiguous sentences without problems based on our knowledge of the world; however, particularly if you’re writing without a lot of context or in a reduced style such as a headline, you may want to double-check or get someone to read over your work to make sure you’re not saying something you didn’t intend! 

Alternatively, if you’re considering a career as a comedian, ambiguities like this can be a great way of subverting people’s expectations and thereby creating humor. 

This article was written by Gretchen McCulloch who blogs at All Things Linguistic. Check out her site for other great posts.

Image courtesy of Shutterstock.