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When you order a kebab and they ask you if you want everything on it, you might say yes. But you'd probably still be surprised if it came with say, chocolate, let alone a bicycle...even though chocolate and bicycles are technically part of "everything". That's because words like "everything" and "all" really mean something more like "everything typical in this situation". Or in linguistic terms, we say that their scope is ambiguous without context. \n\nIn this episode, your hosts Lauren Gawne and Gretchen McCulloch get enthusiastic about how we can think about ambiguity of meaning in terms of scope. We talk about how humour often relies on scope ambiguity, such as a cake with "Happy Birthday in red text" written on it (quotation scope ambiguity) and the viral bench plaque "In Memory of Nicole Campbell, who never saw a dog and didn't smile" (negation scope ambiguity). We also talk about how linguists collect fun examples of ambiguity going about their everyday lives, how gesture and intonation allow us to disambiguate most of the time, and using several scopes in one sentence for double plus ambiguity fun. \n\nRead the transcript here: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/748141442230272000/transcript-episode-91-scope\n\nAnnouncements:\nIn this month\u2019s bonus episode we get enthusiastic about the forms that our thoughts take inside our heads! We talk about an academic paper from 2008 called "The phenomena of inner experience", and how their results differ from the 2023 Lingthusiasm listener survey questions on your mental pictures and inner voices. We also talk about more unnerving methodologies, like temporarily paralyzing people and then scanning their brains to see if the inner voice sections still light up (they do!).\n\nJoin us on Patreon now to get access to this and 80+ other bonus episodes. You\u2019ll also get access to the Lingthusiasm Discord server where you can chat with other language nerds. You can find us at patreon.com/lingthusiasm\n\nAlso: Join at the Ling-phabet tier and you'll get an exclusive \u201cLingthusiast \u2013 a person who\u2019s enthusiastic about linguistics,\u201d sticker! You can stick it on your laptop or your water bottle to encourage people to talk about linguistics with you. Members at the Ling-phabet tier also get their very own, hand-selected character of the International Phonetic Alphabet \u2013 or if you love another symbol from somewhere in Unicode, you can request that instead \u2013 and we put that with your name or username on our supporter Wall of Fame! Check out our Supporter Wall of Fame and become a Ling-phabet patron here: patreon.com/lingthusiasm\n\nFor links to things mentioned in this episode: https://lingthusiasm.com/post/748139974576275456/lingthusiasm-episode-91-scoping-out-the-scope-of