triplets: third attempt

The first time I tried posting this something went wrong. The second time it published fine, but upon further reading it turned out to be so intensely dull that it even bored me. There's no guarantees that this will be any better, but at least I'll put in a bit more effort this time.

A while back I sneaked in some examples of what's known as syntactic (or structural) ambiguity. That included sentences like, Flying planes can be dangerous. The sentence is ambiguous because it could mean (a) it is sometimes dangerous to fly planes, or (b) when planes are in the process of flying they are sometimes dangerous. The ambiguity in this case doesn't arise from any particular word in the sentence, but rather from the construction as a whole, the way the words are combined.

A different kind of ambiguity is known as lexical ambiguity - when a particular word can have more than one interpretation. A textbook example is the word bank, which might refer to the side of a river, or, perhaps more likely, the financial institution. (Another example would be bat, either the flying creature or the thing you use for playing cricket.)

A question arose in my office the other day as to word-forms which can function as different parts of speech while retaining the same form. (If a real syntactician happened to drop by and read this, s/he might not agree that this is another form of ambiguity; but since I wouldn't have an answer for that, we'll just have to hope that no such creature ever comes this way.)* The kind of word-form I mean would be something like sink, which, when you consider it in isolation, just as I've written it there without any supporting context, could be either a noun (as in, My sink has remained unblocked for months now) or a verb (as in, My blog is starting to sink under the weight of so many ponderous opinions); another example would be elaborate, which could be either a verb (as in, Allow me to elaborate on this point), or an adjective (as in, That was a very long and elaborate sentence I just wrote).

There are lots and lots of words in English which can function as two out of the three main lexical categories, noun, verb, and adjective. But the other week, the challenge was on: how many word-forms are there which can function as all three of these categories? To find such words would take us a large step further in our capability to bamboozle first year syntax and morphology students, as well as whiling away a pleasant couple of hours in the halls of academe, given that we don't really have that much else to spend our time on.

One example of a word-form that can be used as either a noun, a verb, or an adjective is light. Exemplified as follows:

[noun] The light was very bright.
[verb] I'm going to light a fire.
[adj] Our shopping bags were very light this week.

Another example would be cross.

[noun] You either got a tick or a cross.
[verb] The chicken didn't really want to cross the road.
[adj] I'm starting to get quite cross.

There are also items like void and square, which I won't think up any illustrative sentences for just now, as well as a few more which we came up with after the office brainstorming session. I'm insisting on talking about word-forms, incidentally, because I'm not sure you'd want to think of cross 'irritated' and cross 'an X' as being related in any way beyond sharing the sequence of sounds c-r-o-s-s (/kɹɔs/ in IPA) - in other words you're looking for homophones, not necessarily words related in meaning or historical origin. And because you're looking for homophones, it doesn't matter if the word-forms don't share the same spelling: I think course/coarse and plain/plane could also go on the list even though they're not homographs.

So if anyone has time on their hands and diagnostic criteria for lexical classes, do feel free to advance the cause of science by contributing to the collection.


* Slogan spotted proudly displayed on a removals van: We drop everything for you! I won't hazard a guess as to what kind of ambiguity that is.