Syntactic or structural ambiguities are often found in humor and advertising. One of the most persistent jokes, supposedly coming from the famous comedian Groucho Marx, was his joke, which used a modifier binding ambiguity: “I shot an elephant in pajamas. How he got into my pajamas, I don`t know. Another sentence that emerged from machine translation research in the early 1960s reads: “Time flies like an arrow; Fruchtfliegen wie eine Banana”. Some structural ambiguity is the result of typographical errors, such as misplaced modifiers. An example from Tom Sant`s book Persuasive Business Proposals: “With plug-in PCBs, we can strongly support the flexibility and growth potential of this server.” Newspaper headlines are written in a telegraphic style (title) that often omits the copula, creating syntactic ambiguity. A common form is the type of garden path. The name Crash Blossoms was suggested for these ambiguous titles by Danny Bloom in the Testy Copy Editors newsgroup in August 2009. He based himself on the title “Violinists associated with JAL crash flowers” posted by Mike O`Connell and asked what such a title could be called. [8] The Columbia Journalism Review regularly publishes such titles in its column “The Lower Case” and has collected them in the anthologies “Squad Helps Dog Victim”[9] and “Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge”. [10] Language Log also has an extensive archive of accident flowers, for example “Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit”. [11] An overall ambiguous sentence is one that has at least two different interpretations. With this kind of ambiguity, after reading or hearing the whole sentence, the ambiguity is always present. Rereading the sentence cannot resolve the ambiguity because no characteristic of the representation (i.e.
the order of the words) distinguishes the different interpretations. Global ambiguities often go unnoticed because the reader tends to choose the direction they think is most likely. An example of global ambiguity is “The woman held the baby in the green blanket.” In this example, the baby, wrapped in the green blanket, is also held by the woman, or the woman uses the green blanket as an instrument to hold the baby. In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted in such a way that it has different syntactic structures. In contrast, with semantic ambiguity, the structure remains the same, but individual words are interpreted differently. [15] [16] Controlled natural languages are often designed to be unique so that they can be analyzed in a logical form. [17] Many cases of structural ambiguity in syntax involve modifiers in positions secondary to one or both interpretations. Some of the practical implications of ambiguity are discussed in 8.3 Semantics and Pragmatics in the Legal Field. Concurrency-based models assume that different parsing competes with each other to resolve syntactic ambiguity.
When probabilistic and linguistic constraints provide comparable support for each analysis, competition is particularly strong. On the other hand, when constraints support one analysis over another, competition is weak and transformation is undemanding. According to the experiments of van Gompel et al. (2005), the reanalysis model was preferred to competition-based models. [19] Among the compelling evidence against competition-based models is the fact that globally ambiguous sentences are easier to process than disambiguated sentences, meaning that there is no concurrency of analysis in an overall ambiguous sentence. Plausibility tends to support an analysis and eliminate competition. However, the model was not completely rejected. Some theories say that competition helps treat complications, albeit briefly.
[19] Syntactic ambiguity does not arise from the meaning of individual words, but from the relationship between the words and sentences in a sentence and the sentence structure underlying the word order it contains. In other words, a sentence is syntactically ambiguous if a reader or listener can reasonably interpret a sentence as having more than one possible structure. Keep in mind that linguistic ambiguity sometimes seems interesting. However, it could also lead to deep misunderstandings. Just know when it`s appropriate to use it and always let others read your article in a case if you don`t intend to use it. Using these examples, we can define ambiguity as any word, phrase, or statement that may have more than one possible meaning. Therefore, the use of this term could confuse the reader or listener with its vagueness. Sometimes people use these terms deliberately; Other times, they don`t even know they`ve used one. In writing and language, there are two forms of ambiguity: lexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity. Structural ambiguity, also known as syntactic ambiguity, occurs when a sentence or sentence has more than one underlying structure. Such a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way.
Here are some examples of structural ambiguity. Structural or syntactic ambiguity is the potential for multiple interpretations for a piece of written or spoken language due to the way words or sentences are organized. Linguistic ambiguity makes it difficult for a human or AI system, such as a natural language processing (NLP) program, to determine meaning, unless other information is available to clarify context. This form of ambiguity is also known as disambiguation or semantic ambiguity. It occurs in the sentence due to misuse of vocabulary, resulting in two or more possible meanings. The ambiguity here lies in the expression “small world”. While the saying “It`s a small world” is generally accepted as having one of many accepted pictorial meanings (what a coincidence; we are not so different from each other, etc.), Wright chose to take the phrase literally. In comparison, the world – as on Earth – may not be as big as other planets, but it would still be a Herculean task to paint them. In section 5.9, we saw cases of structural ambiguity in morphology, cases where the same chain of morphemes can have more than one structure, each structure conforming to a different interpretation.
Research supports the reanalysis model as the most likely reason why difficulties arise in dealing with these ambiguous sentences. [19] The results of numerous experiments tracking subjects` eye movements have shown that it is just as difficult to process an overall ambiguous statement (1) as it is to process a single statement (2 and 3), because information prior to ambiguity does not provide strong bias for either syntactic possibility. [19] In addition, globally ambiguous sentences are just as easy to process as syntactically unique sentences. [19] Although lexical ambiguity can cause problems of meaning, it is not difficult to understand the meaning intended by the author by examining the context. For example, authors M. Eysenck and M. Keane tell us in “Cognitive Psychology” that some syntactic ambiguity occurs on a “global scale,” meaning that entire sentences can be open to two or more possible interpretations, citing the phrase “they bake apples” as an example. Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity,[1] amphibian or amphibology, is a situation in which a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way due to an ambiguous sentence structure.
Lexical ambiguity, also known as semantic ambiguity, occurs when a sentence has an ambiguous word or phrase (which has more than one possible meaning). This phenomenon is a consequence of polysemy. Lexical ambiguity is sometimes intentionally used to create puns and other puns. Here are some examples of lexical ambiguity. Children interpret ambiguous sentences differently than adults because of their lack of experience. Children have not yet learned how the environment and contextual cues can suggest a particular interpretation of a sentence.