Lesson 6

Lesson 6 — Grammatical Topic — Ambiguity: multiple possible meanings

It's time to talk about ambiguity. Both English and Samala allow phrases that are open to more than one possible interpretation. Here's an English example, well-known in linguistic circles:
	The chicken is ready to eat.
This could mean either that the chicken is expecting to have its feed or that the chicken itself is cooked and ready for someone to eat.
Samala allows for different types of ambiguity than in English. Here are three of them that are very common, as you've already seen:
1	–uli ha –itn	"he/she holds his/her [own] child"
	or	"he/she holds his/her child [someone else's]"
2	–uli ha ii	"the child is holding it"
	or	"she holds the child"
3	–uli ha s–pu ha hy	"the man holds her hand"
	or	or "she holds the man's hand"
Hopefully you'll be OK with this discussion of ambiguity in Samala. Even if you don't understand it completely, it's useful to keep in mind so that you don't get into the habit of hearing or reading a sentence only one way when it's actually open to more than one interpretation.

1 — Third-person possessor ambiguity

In Samala, both of these pictures could easily be captioned –uli ha –itn. This could mean:
	"he holds his child" — his own child
or	"she holds her child" — her own child
or	"he holds his/her child" — someone else's child: his sister's new baby, for example
or	"she holds his/her child" — someone else's child: her friend's baby, for example
English shows exactly the same kind of ambiguity here, but less than in Samala.
The Samala third-person marker s– doesn't specify gender, so it doesn't give you the same clues that you get with English "he," "she" and "it."

2 — Subject/Object ambiguity

Both subjects and objects usually come after the verb.
This creates the possibility of reading a sentence more than one way. When the verb has a third-person subject (it starts with s–), then there's a possibility of subject/object ambiguity ) you could interpret the noun as subject or object of the verb.
Sometimes common sense tells you how to interpret the sentence; you know that the noun is the object in
	–it ha alum	"he finds the money"
	s–qilik ha tomol	"he takes care of the canoe"
But with some combinations of third-person verbs and nouns, it's not easy to tell an object from a subject. The sentences below are ambiguous.
Part of the reason for this is that Samala verbs very often simply assume "him" or "her" or "it" as an object without spelling it out for you.


	s–kuti ha xus	"she sees the bear"	or "the bear sees [her]"



	s–icumu ha eneq	"the woman is pointing [at it]"	or "he/she/it is pointing at the woman



	s–itaq ha huu	"she hears the dog"	or "the dog listens/hears [it]"

3 — Possessive phrase ambiguity:

Two nouns after a verb could be the subject and object, but if the first noun has an s– possessive marker, these same two nouns could also be a possessive phrase:
	–uli ha s–pu ha hy
If you hear ha s–pu ha hy as subject and object, you would interpret this as "the man holds her hand."
	The object — what's being held — is ha s–pu "her hand"
	and the subject — who's holding it — is ha hy "the man."
If you hear ha s–pu ha hy as a possessive phrase, you would interpret it as "she holds the man's hand."
	The subject — who's holding it — is "the girl" (implied by s– but not spelled out) and
	the object — what's being held — is ha s–pu ha hy "the man's hand."

If this isn't not too much like diagramming sentences from eighth-grade English, it might help to see the two interpretations laid out to show the relationships.
	–uli — ha s–pu ha hy		"she holds — the man's hand"
	–uli — ha s–pu — ha hy		"he holds — her hand — the man [does]"

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