Lexical ambiguities are when a single word can have two or more meanings. In English, you can find such lexical ambiguities in words like “saw” and “tongue”. “Saw” can either mean cutting something with a saw or the past tense of the verb “see”. The word “tongue” can either mean the human body part or a word for language. Therefore, you can have a sentence for “I saw wolves” and “You have a beautiful tongue” with two completely different meanings. Some can be quite odd, but still make complete sense. English isn’t the only language to have lexical ambiguities, in fact, all human languages are ambiguous on different levels. Being a native Russian speaker myself, I have decided to focus my topic on explaining some of the lexical ambiguities that can be found in the Russian language. There are some very interesting ambiguous words in Russian that I will be discussing and how to go about them in different scenarios, situations, events, etc. One of these examples will be discussing words like “arm” and “hand” which has the same word for both body parts. A sentence you might get is, “My рука (ruka) hurts!”. The catch is, how would you distinguish the two apart in a situation like this one? Is it the arm that hurts? Or the hand?

• 1a entails 1b

1a. I was absent for class.

1b. I was not in class.

• 2a presupposes 2b

2a. Kevin’s dog is super adorable!

2b. Kevin has a dog.

Trigger: Kevin’s (possessive -‘s after the name)

• 3a presupposes 3b

3a. She realized she missed the bus. 

3b. She missed the bus.

Trigger: realized

A pair of words I picked that have the same denotation, but different expressive meanings are “smile” and “smirk”. Smile automatically gives off a positive denotation. For example, if you use smile in a sentence such as, “He gave me a smile yesterday”, to smile is something we generally view as a positive action. Now, if we saw it somewhat differently from a positive action, that smile could have potentially been more than just a regular smile, it could of been a smirk. A smirk is a negative denotation. Smirk automatically gives of this evil, sneaky, villain type of description of a smile. Therefore, based off of how we might perceive it, we could of either said “He smiled at me yesterday.” (a positive action of how we saw the approach) or “He smirked at me yesterday.” (a negative action of how we saw the approach). Nobody would say he smiled at me and assume it was a negative thing without bringing in a negative adjective along with the action, for example, “He gave me an evil smile yesterday” which only then changes the whole perspective of that action and therefore it becomes negative. So instead of doing that, we can easily use the negative denotation of the word “smile” which can technically be “smirk”.