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." [ 39][circular reference] It takes advantage of some German nouns and corresponding verbs being homonymous.
An archer about to loose an arrow. A fruit fly on a banana peel. " Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana " is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis .
The sentence can be given as a grammatical puzzle [7] [8] [9] or an item on a test, [1] [2] for which one must find the proper punctuation to give it meaning. Hans Reichenbach used a similar sentence ("John where Jack had...") in his 1947 book Elements of Symbolic Logic as an exercise for the reader, to illustrate the different levels of language, namely object language and metalanguage.
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.
The sentence could be misread as the turning action attaching either to the handsome school building or to nothing at all. As another example, in the sentence "At the age of eight, my family finally bought a dog", [3] the modifier At the age of eight is dangling. It is intended to specify the narrator's age when the family bought the dog, but ...
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 ...
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. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous ...
Ambiguous grammar. In computer science, an ambiguous grammar is a context-free grammar for which there exists a string that can have more than one leftmost derivation or parse tree. [ 1] Every non-empty context-free language admits an ambiguous grammar by introducing e.g. a duplicate rule.