Ambiguity
Ambiguity is a type of uncertainty of meaning in which several interpretations are plausible. 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 ambi- part of the name reflects an idea of "two" as in two meanings.)
The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness.
In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted
(although some may not be immediately apparent), whereas with
information that is vague, it is difficult to form any interpretation at
the desired level of specificity.
Context may play a role in resolving ambiguity. For example, the same
piece of information may be ambiguous in one context and unambiguous in
another.
The lexical ambiguity
of a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning in the
language to which the word belongs. "Meaning" here refers to whatever
should be captured by a good dictionary. For instance, the word "bank"
has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge of a river". Another example is as in "apothecary". One could say "I bought herbs from the apothecary". This could mean one actually spoke to the apothecary (pharmacist) or went to the apothecary (pharmacy).
The context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident
which of the meanings is intended. If, for instance, someone says "I
buried $100 in the bank", most people would not think someone used a
shovel to dig in the mud. However, some linguistic contexts do not
provide sufficient information to disambiguate a used word.
Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that
automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a
task referred to as word sense disambiguation.
The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to
clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific
intended meaning (in which case, a less ambiguous term should have been
used). The goal of clear concise communication is that the receiver(s)
have no misunderstanding about what was meant to be conveyed. An
exception to this could include a politician whose "weasel words" and obfuscation are necessary to gain support from multiple constituents with mutually exclusive conflicting desires from their candidate of choice. Ambiguity is a powerful tool of political science.
More problematic are words whose senses express closely related
concepts. "Good", for example, can mean "useful" or "functional" (That's a good hammer), "exemplary" (She's a good student), "pleasing" (This is good soup), "moral" (a good person versus the lesson to be learned from a story), "righteous", etc. " I have a good daughter" is not clear about which sense is intended. The various ways to apply prefixes and suffixes can also create ambiguity ("unlockable" can mean "capable of being unlocked" or "impossible to lock").
Syntactic ambiguity
arises when a sentence can have two (or more) different meanings
because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due
to a modifying expression, such as a prepositional phrase, the
application of which is unclear. "He ate the cookies on the couch", for
example, could mean that he ate those cookies that were on the couch (as
opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that he was
sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies. "To get in, you will need
an entrance fee of $10 or your voucher and your drivers' license." This
could mean that you need EITHER ten dollars OR BOTH your voucher and
your license. Or it could mean that you need your license AND you need
EITHER ten dollars OR a voucher. Only rewriting the sentence, or placing
appropriate punctuation can resolve a syntactic ambiguity. For the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in artificial, formal languages (such as computer programming languages), see Ambiguous grammar.
Spoken language
can contain many more types of ambiguities which are called
phonological ambiguities, where there is more than one way to compose a
set of sounds into words. For example, "ice cream" and "I scream". Such
ambiguity is generally resolved according to the context. A mishearing
of such, based on incorrectly resolved ambiguity, is called a mondegreen.
Semantic ambiguity
happens when a sentence contains an ambiguous word or phrase—a word or
phrase that has more than one meaning. In "We saw her duck" (example due
to Richard Nordquist), the word "duck" can refer either
- to the person's bird (the noun "duck", modified by the possessive pronoun "her"), or
- to a motion she made (the verb "duck", the subject of which is the objective pronoun "her", object of the verb "saw").
For example, "You could do with a new automobile. How about a test
drive?" The clause "You could do with" presents a statement with such
wide possible interpretation as to be essentially meaningless.[citation needed]
Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former
represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful
context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice
between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a
standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of ambiguity is closely related
to vagueness.
Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law, because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance.
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