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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 ...
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies." [40] [circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous. While not noticeable ...
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]
Examples include sentences like The critic wrote the book was enlightening, which is ambiguous when The critic wrote the book has been encountered, but was enlightening remains to be processed. Then, the sentence could end, stating that the critic is the author of the book, or it could go on to clarify that the critic wrote something about a book.
Only rewriting the sentence, or placing appropriate punctuation can resolve a syntactic ambiguity. [5] For the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in artificial, formal languages (such as computer programming languages), see Ambiguous grammar. Usually, semantic and syntactic ambiguity go hand in hand.
A common example of ambiguity in computer programming languages is the dangling else problem. In many languages, the else in an If–then(–else) statement is optional, which results in nested conditionals having multiple ways of being recognized in terms of the context-free grammar.
Such examples of initial ambiguity resulting from a "reduced relative with [a] potentially intransitive verb" ("The horse raced in the barn fell.") can be contrasted with the lack of ambiguity for a non-reduced relative ("The horse that was raced in the barn fell.") or with a reduced relative with an unambiguously transitive verb ("The horse ...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the ...