Ambiguity

A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics

// n. The phenomenon in which a single string of words receives two or more sharply distinct meanings. An ambiguity may be purely lexical, as in This lovely port is mentioned in Captain Cook’s diaries, or it may be structural, as in Young boys and girls are easily frightened, Visiting relatives can be a nuisance and Anne likes horses more than Mark. Complex examples of ambiguity exist, such as the classic Janet made the robot fast, which is multiply ambiguous, involving both lexical and structural ambiguities.

An ambiguous string is loosely referred to as an ‘ambiguous sentence’; more precisely, such a string corresponds to two or more distinct sentences. Ambiguity is pervasive in natural languages, and its presence is commonly assumed to mean that adequate formal grammars must be ambiguous grammars. Ambiguity constitutes a major headache for parsers; see also local ambiguity, global ambiguity. Adj. ambiguous.