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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.
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. Structural analysis of an ambiguous Spanish sentence: Pepe vio a Pablo enfurecido.
Blackboard in Harvard classroom shows students' efforts at placing the ü and acute accent diacritics used in Spanish orthography.. When the relevant unit or structure of both languages is the same, linguistic interference can result in correct language production called positive transfer: here, the "correct" meaning is in line with most native speakers' notions of acceptability. [3]
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.
Crosslinguistic influence (CLI) refers to the different ways in which one language can affect another within an individual speaker. It typically involves two languages that can affect one another in a bilingual speaker. [1] An example of CLI is the influence of Korean on a Korean native speaker who is learning Japanese or French.
In linguistics, a comparative illusion (CI) or Escher sentence [a] is a comparative sentence which initially seems to be acceptable but upon closer reflection has no well-formed, sensical meaning. The typical example sentence used to typify this phenomenon is More people have been to Russia than I have .
Another example of an ambiguous sentence is, "I went to the bank." This is an example of lexical ambiguity, as the word bank can either be in reference to a place where money is kept, or the edge of a river. To understand what the speaker is truly saying, it is a matter of context, which is why it is pragmatically ambiguous as well. [15]
Interlinguistics, also known as cosmoglottics, [a] is the science of planned languages that has existed for more than a century. [1] Formalised by Otto Jespersen in 1931 as the science of interlanguages, in more recent times, the field has been more focused with language planning, the collection of strategies to deliberately influence the structure and function of a living language.