A Dictionary of Grammatical Terms in Linguistics
n. An ambiguity which is apparent only when a substring of the full string is considered in isolation, and which in principle disappears when the whole string is considered. In the string The guy who coaches my daughter is a professional, the substring my daughter is a professional represents such a local ambiguity.
Local ambiguities are always involved in garden-path sentences; they are a particular headache in the construction of parsers. Cf. global ambiguity.
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