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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 ...
This ambiguity is an example of scope ambiguity, a phenomenon widely studied in formal semantics. De re/de dicto ambiguity is another notable example of sentence-level ambiguity which has received much attention in linguistics and philosophy. In some analyses, such ambiguities are the semantic reflexes of syntactic ambiguities, though in other ...
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 ...
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.
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]
Syntactic processing is usually taken to be the most basic analysis step, which feeds into semantic processing and the inclusion of other information. A separate mental module parses sentences and lexical access happens first. Then, one syntactic hypothesis is considered at a time. There is no initial influence of meaning, or semantic.
Part-of-speech tagging (which resolves some semantic ambiguity) is a related problem, and often a prerequisite for or a subproblem of syntactic parsing. Syntactic parses can be used for information extraction (e.g. event parsing, semantic role labelling, entity labelling) and may be further used to extract formal semantic representations.
The concept of c-selection overlaps to an extent with subcategorization. Predicates c-select the syntactic category of their complement arguments - e.g. noun (phrase), verb (phrase), adjective (phrase), etc. - i.e. they determine the syntactic category of their complements. In contrast, predicates s-select the semantic content of their arguments.