Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Syntactic ambiguity. 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 ...
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.
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.
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 .
In Syntactic Structures, Chomsky tries to construct a "formalized theory of linguistic structure". He places emphasis on "rigorous formulations" and "precisely constructed models". [ 59] In the first chapter of the book, he gives a definition of human language syntax. He then talks about the goals of syntactic study.
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 ...
Deep structure and surface structure (also D-structure and S-structure although those abbreviated forms are sometimes used with distinct meanings) are concepts used in linguistics, specifically in the study of syntax in the Chomskyan tradition of transformational generative grammar . The deep structure of a linguistic expression is a ...
Colorless green ideas sleep furiously was composed by Noam Chomsky in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures as an example of a sentence that is grammatically well-formed, but semantically nonsensical. The sentence was originally used in his 1955 thesis The Logical Structure of Linguistic Theory and in his 1956 paper "Three Models for the ...