Reviewed by Anish Koshy, The EFL University

This book, the first volume in a two-volume set, is divided into two parts. It contains Part 1, which sets the background by concentrating on theoretical and structural factors, and Part 2, which provides a detailed inventory of the structural possibilities of open-class items.

Ch. 1 discusses the deliberate creation of structural word-play by way of an inventory of formulas that exploit homonyms, gaps, and vulnerability in the grammatical system. What is and is not an instance of structural ambiguity is also laid out here. Ch. 2 focuses on the role of contextual information in clarifying and creating structural ambiguity. Contextual information includes world knowledge and assumptions about the intention of a speaker, ambiguity in telegraphic speech and other registers, age of a text, and expected/assumed competence of speakers, among other features.

Ch. 3 deals with phonological factors that lead to multiple structural interpretations, exploiting phonological processes that erase or smudge distinctions by creating homophones or near-homophones by way of assimilation, epenthesis, or deletion. Uncertainty about word-boundaries in speech and indeterminacy of vowels in unstressed syllables can also be exploited. Ch. 4 focuses on structural ambiguity in various clause types, mostly due to the misanalysis of auxiliaries as main verbs and of main verbs as participial/adjectival complements, or by the masking of subject-verb concord in passives and with modals. Ch. 5, which concludes Part 1, explores morphological features resulting in ambiguity. This includes homophonous affixes like –s and affixes with multiple meanings, and also the potential for incorrect analysis of a linguistic element as an affix that is actually part of the root or base of a word.

Part 2 begins with Ch. 6, which explores the contribution of nouns to structural ambiguity. Nouns can lead to ambiguity by way of the homophonous plural marker –s, optional determiners with some nouns, and the homophony of proper nouns and titles with common nouns. The interpretation of compounds as modifier+noun can also contribute to ambiguity, and there is inherent ambiguity in interpreting compounds. Chs. 7 and 8 explore structural ambiguity in terms of the structural capabilities of transitive and linking/intransitive verbs, respectively, to build multiple sentence/clause types. These depend on the reinterpretation of objects/complements as the other, or in interpreting what follows the verb as a clause/phrase/phrase+complement. Ch. 9 explores structural ambiguities involving adjectives and adverbs by addressing homophony between the two, the ability of adverbs to modify words belonging to more than one word class, inherent and non-inherent meanings, and the transitive/intransitive use of adjectives.

The expected audience being diverse, this book deliberately avoids using much linguistic terminology and, where it does, it provides useful explanations. This book is a positive addition to work on humor and word-play in the linguistic literature. Many examples have been provided to support the arguments presented. Linguists will find the book useful in their classrooms, although at times they may find the repetition of the same examples under different grammatical categories to be superfluous or even unjustified.