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Concept
Syntactic ambiguity
Summary
Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure.
Syntactic ambiguity does not come from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure hidden behind the word order. In other words, a sentence is syntactically ambiguous when a reader or listener can reasonably interpret one sentence as having multiple possible structures.
In law cases, courts may be asked to interpret the meaning of such ambiguities in laws or contracts. In some instances, arguments claiming highly unlikely interpretations have been called frivolous. A set of possible parse trees for an ambiguous sentence is called a parse forest. The process of resolving syntactic ambiguity is called syntactic disambiguation.
A globally ambiguous sentence is one that has at least two distinct interpretations.In this type of ambiguity, after one has read or heard the entire sentence, the ambiguity is still present. Rereading the sentence cannot resolve the ambiguity because no feature of the representation (i.e. word order) distinguishes the distinct interpretations. Global ambiguities are often unnoticed because the readers tends to choose the meaning they understands to be more probable. One example of a global ambiguity is "The woman held the baby in the green blanket." In this example, the baby, incidentally wrapped in the green blanket, is being held by the woman, or the woman is using the green blanket as an instrument to hold the baby, or the woman is wrapped in the green blanket and holding the baby.
A locally ambiguous sentence is a sentence that contains an ambiguous phrase but has only one interpretation. The ambiguity in a locally ambiguous sentence briefly stays and is resolved, i.e., disambiguated, by the end of the speech.
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