What does ambiguity do? How is poetic indeterminacy constitutive of propositional content? Do rhetorical and poetic tropes organize communicative acts in order to make them more understandable? Or do they rather dis-organize them in order to make them more understandable? What, then, is understanding? Does the call of the phoneme (Culler 1988) clarify and crystallize semantic reference? Distract us from the clarity of semantic reference? Simply distract us? The potential attraction and distraction of ambiguity is ever-present in discourse.
Language is an organizer of the world into meaningful units and gives form to experience. However, this organizing role of language is, by a number of accounts, the root cause of both the possibility of meaning and the inevitability of ambiguity. Because languages are inevitably smaller than the worlds of experience they describe, words have get more than one meaning.
The problem of potential polysemy in grammar is one of the most important, the one which is very complex and seems to be relevant to a number of aspects. Observations in this area have proved the efficiency of contextual, distributional and transformational methods of linguistic analysis. We distinguish here the interdependence of word-forms within the syntactic structure, the interdependence of elements within the word-forms and the influence of other levels of the same language.
