The four markers of ambiguity increase over time in Putin, Saakashvili, and Hussein they decrease in NATO, Medvedev, and in James and Flaubert.
We suspect ambiguity to be diversely at work in each of these data sets. Novels completed the corpus, Henry James’ The Bostonians, and Flaubert’s Sentimental Education and its original French version, L’Éducation Sentimentale.
We marshaled speeches by President Putin and NATO Secretary Rasmussen (Ukrainian crisis), President Medvedev and President Saakashvili (Russian intervention in Georgia), and speeches by President Saddam Hussein. We feed these markers of ambiguity on a computer-aided text analysis build-out to trace how ambiguity in leaders’ cant changes with time. London: Random House, 2004) seven types of ambiguity, we scouted and built out four we could set up in digital format: (1) vagueness, (2) contronyms, (3) polysemous words, and (4) unusual juxtapositions of words in rum sequences. Sounding ambiguity in crisis writings versus fictions, we use tools that signal shades of meaning that allow for alternative reading. Smoke and mirrors: Tracing ambiguity in texts Smoke and mirrors: Tracing ambiguity in textsĪbstract ‘The corruption of man is followed by the corruption of language’ (Emerson, Nature and Selected Essays.