Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase applies to it having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. [4] "Meaning" here refers to whatever should be represented by a good dictionary. For instance, the word "bank" has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river".
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
The meaning of the word is imprecise or open to more than one interpretation. For example, in "the Sun is bright", 'bright' is a relative term that does nothing to inform the reader of how bright the Sun actually is, nor how bright it is compared to other celestial bodies.
If separating words using spaces is also permitted, the total number of known possible meanings rises to 58. [38] Czech has the syllabic consonants [r] and [l], which can stand in for vowels. A well-known example of a sentence that does not contain a vowel is Strč prst skrz krk, meaning "stick your finger through the neck."
For the second portion of the list, see List of words having different meanings in American and British English: M–Z. Asterisked (*) meanings, though found chiefly in the specified region, also have some currency in the other region; other definitions may be recognised by the other as Briticisms or Americanisms respectively. Additional usage ...
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
While convergent semantic processing and the activation of common word meanings and semantic features are advantageous for various linguistic tasks, the left hemisphere faces challenges in scenarios where the recognition of an ambiguous word requires the activation of multiple primes that can either converge into a subordinate meaning or ...
[citation needed] The term parse forest refers to the collection of all possible syntactic structures, known as parse trees, that can represent the ambiguous sentence's meanings. [2] [3] The task of clarifying which meaning is actually intended from among the possibilities is known as syntactic disambiguation. [4]