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Punctuation can be used to introduce ambiguity or misunderstandings where none needed to exist. One well known example, [17] for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading). Enter QUINCE for the Prologue Prologue If we offend, it is with our good will.
Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, [1] amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the varied meanings of individual words but rather from the relationships among words and clauses ...
Circumlocution is often used by beginner and intermediate second language speakers to convey the meaning of a word they don't know in their target language. Relative clauses are often used for circumlocution in English. [4] For example, [Firefighters] are the people who you call when your house is on fire.
This can be shown mathematically to result in a system that is ambiguous when context is neglected. In this way, ambiguity is viewed as a generally useful feature of a linguistic system. Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law, because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance.
The language itself is sometimes a contributing factor in the overall effect of semantic ambiguity, in the sense that the level of ambiguity in the context can change depending on whether or not a language boundary is crossed. [3] Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous.
The last line of a paragraph continuing on to a new page (highlighted yellow) is a widow (sometimes called an orphan). In typesetting, widows and orphans are single lines of text from a paragraph that dangle at either the beginning or end of a block of text, or form a very short final line at the end of a paragraph. [1]
A paragraph (from Ancient Greek παράγραφος (parágraphos) 'to write beside') is a self-contained unit of discourse in writing dealing with a particular point or idea. Though not required by the orthographic conventions of any language with a writing system , paragraphs are a conventional means of organizing extended segments of prose .
Fixed word order is one out of many ways to ease the processing of sentence semantics and reducing ambiguity. One method of making the speech stream less open to ambiguity (complete removal of ambiguity is probably impossible) is a fixed order of arguments and other sentence constituents. This works because speech is inherently linear.