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Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, [1] amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the varied meanings of individual words but rather from the relationships among words and clauses ...
Demonstrations of ambiguity between alternative syntactic structures underlying a sentence. I made her duck. [9] [10] One morning I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I don't know. [11] Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana. Eats shoots and leaves
Syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two (or more) different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due to a modifying expression, such as a prepositional phrase, the application of which is unclear.
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1] Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]
The ambiguity ends at was enlightening, which determines that the second alternative is correct. When readers process a local ambiguity, they settle on one of the possible interpretations immediately without waiting to hear or read more words that might help decide which interpretation is correct (the behaviour is called incremental processing ...
Ibis redibis nunquam per bella peribis (alternatively Ibis redibis nunquam in bello morieris) is a Latin phrase, often used to illustrate the meaning of syntactic ambiguity to students of either Latin or linguistics. Traditionally, it is attributed to the oracles of Dodona. The phrase is thought to have been uttered by a general consulting the ...
This sentence is semantically ambiguous. Specifically, it contains a scope ambiguity. This ambiguity cannot be resolved at surface structure, since someone, being within the verb phrase, must be lower in the structure than everyone. This case exemplifies the general fact that natural language is insufficiently specified for strict logical ...
In computer science, an ambiguous grammar is a context-free grammar for which there exists a string that can have more than one leftmost derivation or parse tree. [1] [2] Every non-empty context-free language admits an ambiguous grammar by introducing e.g. a duplicate rule.