Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
A famous example for lexical ambiguity is the following sentence: "Wenn hinter Fliegen Fliegen fliegen, fliegen Fliegen Fliegen hinterher.", meaning "When flies fly behind flies, then flies fly in pursuit of flies."
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.
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 ...
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.
For example, the second clause can be read as "fruit travels through the air similar to a banana" or as "certain insects enjoy a banana". This is an example of a garden-path sentence , a phrase that the reader or listener normally begins to parse according to one grammatical structure, and is then forced to back up and reparse when the sentence ...
For instance, some sentences display a scope ambiguity in that the relative scopes of two operators can be construed in multiple ways. [1] [2] Every hedgehog is friends with a giraffe. This sentence can be understood in two ways. On the inverse scope reading, there is a single giraffe who is very popular in the hedgehog community.
The ambiguity ends at was enlightening, which determines that the second alternative is correct. When readers process a local ambiguity, they settle on one of the possible interpretations immediately without waiting to hear or read more words that might help decide which interpretation is correct (the behaviour is called incremental processing ...
The existence of multiple derivations of the same string does not suffice to indicate that the grammar is ambiguous; only multiple leftmost derivations (or, equivalently, multiple parse trees) indicate ambiguity. For example, the simple grammar S → A + A A → 0 | 1 is an unambiguous grammar for the language { 0+0, 0+1, 1+0, 1+1 }.