Ambiguity Project

Ambiguity in legal language is very common, and judges’ decisions about what meaning a phrase has can affect verdicts. The Ambiguity Project is the LingLawLab’s attempt to clear these ambiguities and help judges determine how to interpret laws.

Two experiments in this project focus on prepositional phrases on noun conjuncts.

Here’s an example.

Imagine you drive your car into a parking lot and see a sign that reads:

“Residents may park cars and trucks with permits.”

You don’t have a permit—can you park there? Do both cars and trucks need permits, or just trucks?

Results from our experiments show that native English speakers read these kinds of sentences with a preference for wide scope—that is, the prepositional phrase modifies both nouns, [cars and trucks], rather than just [trucks].

Consider a different sign:

“Residents may park cars and trucks on weekends.”

This sign is not ambiguous at all. The PP [on weekends] modifies the verb, [park], not [cars and trucks]. A third experiment shows that native speakers similarly prefer a wide scope reading on VP modifiers, but it differs in that there is no ambiguity.

In far more serious laws, reaching as far as the Supreme Court of the United States, it is important to get this right.