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Ambiguity


Ambiguity is a term used to characterise phenomena that have more than only one meaning. These meanings are distinct from each other and have no close schema in common.


There are several forms of ambiguity to be distinguished :


Lexical Ambiguity


Lexical ambiguity is concerned with multiple interpretations of lexemes. A word is ambiguous if it involves two lexical items that have identical forms, but have distinct, i.e. unrelated meanings.


The most classical example of lexical ambiguity is bank, which may either denote an organisation providing financial services, or the side of a river – just to mention two of the lexeme’s possible meanings.


Further examples of lexical ambiguity are:
bright - a bright (intelligent) person vs. bright (sunny) weather


Structural Ambiguity


Structural ambiguity is a result of two or more different syntactic structures that can be attributed to one string of words. That means that a sentence is structurally ambiguous not because it contains a single lexeme that has several distinct meanings, but because the syntactic structure of the sentence causes multiple interpretations.


 Young boys and girls love the adventure playground.


This sentence is syntactically ambiguous, because the reference of young is unclear. There are two possible interpretations of the subject. It may either be that [young boys] and girls love the adventure playground, or young [boys and girls] love [it]. The structural analysis shows that the sentence may be interpreted in a way that young only refers to the boys, or it may be understood as characterising the boys as well as the girls.