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This volume uncovers a great mystery about language: why can we communicate so effectively despite the fact that ambiguity is pervasive? Conversely, how do speakers use ambiguity to achieve a specific goal? Answers to these questions are provided from different fields: (psycho)linguistics, literary criticism, rhetoric, theology, media studies, [and] law.

This edited volume investigates the concept of ambiguity and how it manifests itself in language and communication from a new perspective.The main goal is to uncover a great mystery: why can we communicate effectively despite the fact that ambiguity is pervasive in the language that we use?.

Chapter 1. Buying votes: A Congressman's ideological ambiguity, receipts of campaign contributions, and expected ideology. This present paper explores the relation among a Congressman's expected ideology, ideological ambiguity and the receipts of campaign contributions by using a simple one-period model in which two lobby groups compete for the Congressman's vote. First, to attract more influence-motivated campaign contributions, a Congressman should act more ambiguously when one lobby group has more advantage than the other. Second, a Congressman whose ideology is on extreme left or right will receive less in influence-motivated campaign contributions. It is interesting that a Congressman's ideological ambiguity may attract more campaign contributions although two lobby groups dislike the ambiguity by nature. Chapter 2. How ambiguous is a Congressman? We provide a measure of a Congressman's ideology and a measure of his ideological ambiguity to be used for empirical studies. Poole and Rosenthal and Heckman and Snyder have provided excellent ways to estimate a Congressman's ideology in a multi-dimensional space via roll call voting records, but it is difficult to extend their framework to provide a measure of a Congressman's ideological ambiguity. Starting with a one-dimensional model, we use a Probit model to estimate a Congressman's ideology as well as the ideological ambiguity. We show that ideological ambiguity is one important characteristic of Congressmen's voting behavior. We also find that Congressmen who are biased to the right or to the left tend to have more ambiguous ideologies. Chapter 3. Campaign contributions and ideology. Campaign contributions can be influence-motivated or election-motivated . In theory, influence-motivated campaign contributions should be given to unbiased (centrist) Congressmen, and a Congressman's ideological ambiguity may increase such influence-motivated contributions. On the other hand, election-motivated campaign contributions should be given to those Congressmen whose ideologies are biased to the right or to the left, and ideological ambiguity may deter such election-motivated campaign contributions. This paper conducts an empirical study of the relationship between campaign contributions and Congressmen's ideological positions, as well as the ideological ambiguity shown in roll call voting records. Our results suggest that campaign contributions tend to be given to unbiased Congressmen. That is, influence-motivated campaign contributions are more prominent. However, ideological ambiguity has no significant marginal influence on campaign contributions since Congressmen have chosen their optimal ideological ambiguities.

Scholars have made important advances in explaining policy drift, uncovering the prevalence of drift in veto-riddled systems, the importance of bureaucratic discretion and statutory ambiguity in combatting drift, and its feedback effects. Despite research demonstrating the potential for judicial action to alleviate drift, we know little about the potential for the Supreme Court to facilitate policy drift. I argue that the Supreme Court may operate as a powerful agent of drift by stripping statutes of ambiguity, foreclosing policy innovation in institutions outside of Congress, and curtailing bureaucratic discretion and authority. To demonstrate these mechanisms, I show how in the case of federal labor law, the Court’s jurisprudence addressing the right to strike, federal preemption, and National Labor Relations Board authority played a central role in gradually undoing the efficacy of The National Labor Relations Act. This inquiry has important implications for understanding public policy, judicial power, the development of American labor law, and American democracy.

The concept of liminality favours a broad interpretation, lending itself easily to disciplinary contexts outside of the original framework of cultural anthropology. Developed by Arnold van Gennep and Victor Turner by exploring the rites of passage, liminality points to in-between situations and conditions where established structures are dislocated, hierarchies reversed, and traditional settings of authority possibly endangered. The liminal state is a central phase in all social and cultural transitions as it marks the passage of the subject through ‘a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state’. It is thus a realm of great ambiguity, since the ‘liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. Yet, as a threshold situation, liminality is also a vital moment of creativity, a potential platform for renewing the societal make-up.

Statutory interpretation is a unique legal field that appreciates fiction as much as fact. For years, judges and scholars have acknowledged that canons of interpretation are often based on erudite assumptions of how Congress drafts federal statutes. But a recent surge in legal realism has shown just how erroneous many of these assumptions are. Scholars have created a robust study of congressional practices that challenge many formalist canons of interpretation that are divorced from how Congress thinks about, drafts, and enacts federal statutes. This conversation, however, has yet to confront statutory incorporation, which describes when Congress incorporates state law into federal statutes. Statutory incorporation is one of the most common legislative tools employed by Congress and has been used to enact hundreds of federal statutes that affect liberty and property rights across multiple areas of law. Traditional analyses of statutory incorporation argue that it allows Congress to achieve goals of federalism and/or delegation, both of which empower state governments to shape federal policies. But this traditional narrative falls short when held up to the scrutiny of statutory realism. This Article offers an alternative explanation: specifically, that statutory incorporation is a tool that allows Congress to abdicate federal legislative responsibility and pass it on to the states, which in turn allows the politically motivated members of Congress to avoid political accountability. This theory of a more interest-based statutory incorporation is an important contribution that adds to the growing realism literature in the statutory incorporation field and carries important implications for the future of scrutinizing the fictions that dominate this space.

In the course of his ethnographic study of the Ndembu tribes, the renowned anthropologist Victor Turner focused on the elaborate rituals that marked various phases of social transition, such as puberty and marriage. Also drawing on the work of Arnold van Gennep on rites of passage, Turner identified the entities going through social transitions as liminals, that ‘are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, convention, and ceremonial’. According to Turner, the defining attribute of liminal positions is their ambiguity and indeterminacy because they ‘elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’.

Ambiguity – the capacity to have multiple meanings – is endemic to politics. Ambiguity creates political opportunities, structures debates and provides leeway for political entrepreneurs to advance their interests. I use the 2012 passage and 2014 rollback of reforms to the National Flood Insurance Program to show how ambiguity enables political entrepreneurship. In this puzzling case, Congress enacted and rolled back changes that threatened to impose politically unpalatable costs. Using semi-structured interviews and congressional testimony, I show how political entrepreneurs engaged with ambiguity in the buildup to the reforms' passage. They used information strategically to interpret problems, solutions, rules, and goals; shape legislators' perceptions of the reforms' political implications; and adapt their arguments to the policy windows that opened. The case shows that ambiguity facilitates policy reform, but the direction of change depends on the priorities that are salient when a policy window opens and on the interests of political entrepreneurs.

The Second Pan-African Congress of 1921 was an international meeting organized around three sessions in three different European capitals (London, Brussels, and Paris). Notwithstanding its moderate program, colonial powers regarded it as an offshoot of Bolshevik and Garveyite propaganda. These allegations sparked a fierce internal debate between the French Pan-African leader Blaise Diagne and the US delegation, the former accusing the latter of being too critical of colonialism. However, the US delegates were mainly members of the Black bourgeoisie, hardly accountable for the radicalism denounced during the Congress sessions. They exemplified a depiction of the intellectual elite described by their leader, W.E.B. Du Bois, in his influential writings on the “Talented Tenth.” Based on an analysis of the US delegation, this article examines the characteristics of early Pan-Africanism and the ambiguous relationship between the Pan-African Congress and the European colonial powers.

Tilda Swinton is hard to classify as a performer because flux and mutability have become her signature qualities. One enduring element in her repertoire, however, can be brought into focus through Lauren Berlant's concept of \"flat affect.\" Typically described as mysterious, otherworldly, or ethereal, Swinton often brings to her screen and live performances a quality or atmosphere that contradicts the conventional expectations of feminine emotional expressiveness and legibility in popular cinema. As a contribution to this special issue on Berlant's work, my article traces Swinton's styles of flat affect as an aesthetic relationality across a number of films, including Teknolust, Michael Clayton, The Deep End, and Orlando. My reading of Swinton's capacity for flatness places it within the history of her unusual facility to cross between independent and more popular cultural forms and to set femininity as genre in motion as she does so. Famous for embodying gender ambiguity since her performance as Orlando, Swinton's association with androgyny as a pre-queer promise of limitlessness folds femininity back upon its historical conventions and imperatives. In tracing the history of Swinton's gender fluctuations, this article concludes by reflecting on some of the failures of feminist and queer language to articulate the nuances of affective registers; androgyne, butch, tomboy, trans, and genderqueer designate styles of gendered and sexual embodiment, but these do not extend satisfactorily to aesthetic moods and atmospheres. Closing with a discussion of \"offgender\" flux, the article considers Swinton's recent twinning with David Bowie to open up how her performances reinvent affective genres while calling forth their histories and temporalities.