Ambiguous Grammatical Forms in Latvian Corpora

Ambiguous grammatical forms (AGF) combine the characteristics of different parts of speech, and it is up to the receiver to decide whether a word is, for example, a subject, object, or predicate. When the sender does not provide explicit cotextual and contextual cues for interpretation, she assumes no responsibility for the content of the message but reserves the right to reject the receiver’s interpretation as inadequate. In this capacity, AGF can be used to maintain hierarchical social relations between communicators. Hence, language is not a neutral means of communication, critical discourse analysis maintains. This paper seeks statistical support for this claim by testing the null hypothesis: If AGF are neutral carriers of meaning, the difference in their relative frequencies in the specialized corpora is not statistically significant. Analysis of the Latvian language corpora rejected the null hypothesis. The highest incidence of AGF was found in messages created by powerful social institutions: laws, doctoral dissertations, and news from the Internet media. Literary works, magazines, and everyday conversations contain the least number of ambiguous forms.