Introduction: Polysemy, Ambiguity and Generativity

Ambiguity is the wild child of language interpretation. Whether from the point of view of the philosopher, linguist, psychologist, lexicographer, or computer scientist, ambiguity problems have relentlessly resisted taming. This volume, and thus my comments, focus in particular on some issues raised by lexical ambiguity, and do not deal with the many other varieties of ambiguity, such as structural or syntactic ambiguity, scope ambiguity, and logical ambiguity.