Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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 ...
In social psychology, ambiguity is a factor used in determining peoples' responses to various situations. High levels of ambiguity in an emergency (e.g. an unconscious man lying on a park bench) make witnesses less likely to offer any sort of assistance, due to the fear that they may have misinterpreted the situation and acted unnecessarily.
Punctuation can be used to introduce ambiguity or misunderstandings where none needed to exist. One well known example, [17] for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading).
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 higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. [1] Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. [2]
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
When "fine" is used as a greeting ritual, it's mostly meaningless. Many people say "fine" to "how are you" even when they're feeling vulnerable, because they don't read the question as genuine.
In linguistics (particularly sub-fields like applied linguistics and pragmatics), a hedge is a word or phrase used in a sentence to express ambiguity, probability, caution, or indecisiveness about the remainder of the sentence, rather than full accuracy, certainty, confidence, or decisiveness. [1]