The concluding Chapter 8 gives a summary of the language disputes covered in the previous seven chapters. It then tries to answer the general question about why these disputes have arisen in American courts among people who do not normally miscommunicate and disagree like this. Four reasons are given. First, in cases of ambiguity and multiple interpretations one side in the dispute paid insufficient attention to, or chose to ignore, the disambiguating role of context. Second, at the heart of the dispute there was often a subtle and complex aspect of linguistic meaning and comprehension that the theories and empirical methods of the language sciences are designed to explain. Their findings can provide relevant linguistic information to the triers of fact for legal decision-making, and these subtleties and complexities would often not have been appreciated without linguistic expertise. Third, there were regularly legal and financial advantages and benefits that were motivating each of the parties in the dispute. And fourth, some of the opinions delivered by language consultants were unhelpful because these “experts” had little expertise in relevant areas of the language sciences.

This chapter shows how Laura Riding’s poetry was responding to a now-unrecognisable scientific regime of reading that prioritised exactitude over ambiguity. For her, this regime was brought about by the emergence of a new kind of literary critic, one she scathingly referred to as a bureaucratic ‘expert’. In response, her verse aimed to develop a superior form of exactitude, which she hoped would provide a poetics of literal truth. However, this chapter suggests that if Riding’s poetry does evince a truth-content, then it is not in its supposed exactitude but rather in how its artifice demonstrates a thinking precisely in excess of the forms of rational knowing that sought to determine it. In Riding’s own poetry – and this despite her best intentions – it is precisely what she would call its graphic and sonorous ‘freakishness’ that displayed the truth-content of that which scientific modernity consigned to the unknowable. This chapter thus reads Riding as an unchosen path for the history of poetics, one devoted to thinking about poetry’s singular truth-content in an era devoted to scientific specialisation and professionalisation.

The current chapter focuses on basic properties of communication that inform the ways that the study of communication and the study of relationships intersect. These properties include interdependence (the idea that messages simultaneously influence and are influenced by messages that precede and follow them), reflexivity (the notion that communication creates and is constrained by structure), complexity (the concept that communication conveys multiple messages and functions at different levels of analysis), ambiguity (the notion that any given message has various meanings), and indeterminancy (the idea that messages can have multiple and diverse outcomes on relationships). Research on relationship narratives, message features, multiple goals, and message processing, among other topics, is reviewed and challenges for researchers who study communication and relationships are discussed.

The introduction outlines the historical problem central to this book. Namely, the question of what it meant to possess. The question loomed large in the eighteenth century because more people owned more things (particularly moveable property), the social function of movable property was shifting and in the commercial age, the law was often uncertain as to what could be owned and how. The introduction shows how the book seeks to explore the problem of what it meant to possess by examining how people responded to the loss of possessions.

How did early modern women and their families know they were pregnant? Childbearing guides of the period suggested that married women could know they were pregnant very soon after sex, and was related to moral and sexual continency. Women were encouraged to ‘keep accounts’ in their paperwork of their health and bodies, both as a tool to discover pregnancy quickly and as part of the broader culture of Protestant self-examination. Writing about conception and pregnancy sought to impose certainty on what was otherwise an ambiguous experience. Since keeping good accounts and records was linked to piety, orderly gendered labour and status, these records became examples of the respectability of families more broadly.

Taking E. M. Forster and Virginia Woolf as case studies, this chapter examines the relationships – both clear and opaque – among their lives, their writings, and social progress. From a bird’s-eye view, these interrelations seem clear and linear: sexual tolerance and freedom have expanded since Bloomsbury’s time, signal forms of progress to which these authors’ unconventional loves and sensitive writings contributed. But seen from more intimate angles, these interrelations betray lacunae and discontinuities worthy of modernism. Their lives and writings were often not in sync: they wrote about things they had not experienced (Forster on sexual intimacy), feared things that did not befall them (Woolf foreseeing marriage as a catastrophe), avoided taboo topics (Forster on homosexuality), or failed – due to their lack of vocabulary – to describe avant-garde lifestyles they were enjoying (Woolf on urban tribes, Forster on polyamory). For all their articulateness, it would require later generations, including Bloomsbury’s respondents such as Angelica Bell and Michael Cunningham, to clarify how Woolf and Forster contributed – for good or ill – to the ever-evolving phenomena of intimacy.

This chapter explores the intersection of historical linguistics and psycholinguistics by investigating the role of core psycholinguistic factors and phenomena in language change: frequency, salience, chunking, priming, analogy, ambiguity and acquisition. Recent research from cognitive sciences, particularly within a complex systems framework, reveals that language change is influenced by patterns of use and is interconnected with language acquisition and cognition. Bridging the gap between community and individual research, the chapter highlights studies that explore this relationship. It also examines the potential of psycholinguistic methodologies for diachronic research. Additionally, the chapter suggests avenues for further research where psycholinguistic perspectives have had less impact on the study of historical language change. Furthermore, it discusses how psycholinguistic factors have been incorporated into various theoretical approaches to English language change, such as generative and usage-based modelling.

In 1921 representatives of the United Kingdom and of the revolutionary Sinn Féin administration in Ireland signed a conditional agreement that subsequently became a treaty establishing the Irish Free State. Lawyers played an important role on each side, none more so than F. E. Smith (Lord Birkenhead), the then UK Cabinet Secretary. Thomas Jones observed caustically that ‘it is notorious that a lawyer cannot draft his own will clearly’. As regards the ambit of a Boundary Commission proposed by Article 12 to redraw the border created in Ireland in 1920 by the United Kingdom, Irish leaders Arthur Griffith and Michael Collins ultimately relied on British goodwill. Birkenhead depended on his knowledge of legal precedent and the Privy Council. This chapter considers the professional status of lawyers on each side and suggests that a certain ambiguity in the agreement enabled a settlement more readily than any insistence on absolute clarity would have.

This chapter examines William of Ockham’s theory of mental speech, focusing on aspects that have been claimed to give rise to the possibility of pernicious ambiguity. Against these claims, which center on the varieties of reference allowed by supposition theory, we argue that Ockham’s theory remains coherent despite marginal instances of ambiguity. We review two types of suppositional ambiguity: Type 1, in which referring terms can be interpreted as suppositing personally, materially, or simply; and Type 2, in which supposition is personal but can vary in tense or modality. Type 1 ambiguity is ruled out, except in extreme cases, by the fact that “changing” the supposition of a term requires a conscious, reflexive act of the speaker; Type 2 ambiguity, while more of a live possibility, is generally either absent or harmless. In neither case does ambiguity seriously compromise the function of mental speech as a vehicle of human cognition.

The complexities inherent in healthcare organisations highlight the multifaceted nature of their operations. Regardless of role, scale, procedural intricacies or governance structures, these organisations need to deal with the complexities of both internal dynamics and external landscapes. The diversity of stakeholders involved adds layers of challenge to effectively managing clinical and social processes, optimising outcomes, allocating resources equitably, developing and retaining a skilled workforce, making informed decisions and upholding ethical standards.

Chapter 6 explores Geoffrey Chaucer’s Ovidian exilic voice. Scholarly thought has long held that Chaucer did not read or even know Ovid’s exile poetry, a contention which this chapter refutes. While Gower relied on explicit linguistic borrowing to inhabit Ovid in exile, Chaucer instead took an indirect approach, embedding Ovidian refrains, themes and concerns across his corpus. Menmuir discusses Chaucer’s linguistic references to Ovid’s exile poetry, which are our most direct pieces of evidence demonstrating that he was aware of the exilic works and knew how they could be effectively deployed. Direct quotations of Ovid, however, do not constitute Chaucer inhabiting an exilic voice. The latter half of the chapter argues that Chaucer became the Ovidian exile in the figures of Troilus and the narrator in Troilus and Criseyde; the Prologue to The Legend of Good Women, where the narrator is an Ovidian exile responding to an irascible ruler; and in Chaucer’s ‘Retraction’, which closes The Canterbury Tales by appealing to Ovidian exilic ambiguity. These works show the extent to which Chaucer understood the fundamental concerns of Ovid in exile, adopting them for his own work and times, his own tense imperial relations and his own desire for poetic immortality.

Chapter 1 presents Ovid in exile as a highly self-conscious, reflexive figure whose ironic turns perforate a real desire to effect both an imperial pardon and poetic immortality. Moreover, the chapter situates Ovid as the first respondent to his exile, finding many points of commonality between the ways that Ovid and medieval respondents reacted to his exile (in other words, medieval audiences used Ovid as a model for their responses). This chapter makes these arguments from three perspectives. Firstly, it characterises Ovid’s response, focusing especially on his desire to control the narrative being relayed both to Augustus in Rome and to posterity. Secondly, it explores Ovid’s tendency to revise his works. He edits and revises his pre-exilic poetry from the perspective of his exile and reworks his exile poetry over the course of his relegation. Finally, it argues that Ovid’s depictions of his exile as severe are another vehicle for modelling a flexible response. Overall, Ovid constructed an authoritative hold over his life and works but nevertheless formed a response which allowed for ambiguities that could be embedded into that authority. This double model allowed medieval respondents to incorporate both equivocation and authority into their own poetic self-presentation.

Legal language is often ambiguous. Consider: “Only cars and trucks with permits are allowed.” Does [PP with permits] have “wide scope” over the entire series [NP cars and trucks] or “narrow scope” over only the closest noun, [trucks]? Judges often choose narrow scope, citing a legal canon, the “Last Antecedent Rule.” But they sometimes choose wide scope, referencing the “Series Qualifier Canon,” which assigns modifiers to a series. Though judges claim to want to use “most people’s” interpretations, these conflicting choices led us to ask “What WOULD most people say?” We ran three experiments to find out.

Overall, wide scope was preferred. With biased PPs, the preference dropped slightly when the bias matched the last noun, “[NP cars and trucks] [PP with trailers],” but not the first, “[NP trucks and cars] [PP with trailers],” where a universal syntactic “No Crossing Branches principle” limits the PP’s domain. With temporal PPs, “People may park [NP cars and trucks] [PP on weekends],” the preference was also uniformly wide scope, not surprisingly, since these PPs can only modify verbs, not nouns. Taken together, our experiments show how experimental psycholinguistics can offer powerful evidence about how “most people” understand legal language, important information for judges and lawmakers alike.