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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.
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 ...
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.
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 Empson finds in the poetry ...
Ambiguity tolerance–intolerance is a construct that was first introduced in 1949 through the work of Else Frenkel-Brunswik while researching ethnocentrism in children [ 2] and was perpetuated by her research of ambiguity intolerance in connection to authoritarian personality. [ 3] It serves to define and measure how well an individual ...
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
Ambiguous images or reversible figures are visual forms that create ambiguity by exploiting graphical similarities and other properties of visual system interpretation between two or more distinct image forms. These are famous for inducing the phenomenon of multistable perception.
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.