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A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The prefix ambi - reflects the idea of "two", as in "two meanings"). The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness.
Seven Types of Ambiguity. Seven Types of Ambiguity is a work of literary criticism by William Empson which was first published in 1930. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. [ 1] The book is organized around seven types of ambiguity that ...
Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves the distinction between sense and reference. Sense is given by the ideas and concepts associated with an expression while reference is the object ...
Semantic ambiguity. In linguistics, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. [ 1] Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody.
Equivocation. In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument. [ 1][ 2] It is a type of ambiguity that stems from a phrase having two or more distinct meanings, not from the grammar or structure of the ...
Attributional ambiguity. Attributional ambiguity is a psychological attribution concept describing the difficulty that members of stigmatized or negatively stereotyped groups may have in interpreting feedback. According to this concept, a person who perceives themselves as stigmatized can attribute negative feedback to prejudice. [1]
Nominalization. In linguistics, nominalization or nominalisation, also known as nouning, [ 1] is the use of a word that is not a noun (e.g., a verb, an adjective or an adverb) as a noun, or as the head of a noun phrase. This change in functional category can occur through morphological transformation, but it does not always.
Circumlocution (also called circumduction, circumvolution, periphrasis, kenning,[ 1][dubious – discuss] or ambage[citation needed]) is the use of an unnecessarily large number of words to express an idea. It is sometimes necessary in communication (for example, to work around lexical gaps that might otherwise lead to untranslatability ), but ...