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For philosophical considerations of ambiguity, see ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity is a property of sentences which may be reasonably interpreted in more that one way, or reasonably interpreted to mean more than one thing. Ambiguity may or may not involve one word having two parts of speech or homonyms. Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of of a sentence, and the sentence structure implied thereby. When a reader can reasonably interpret the same sentence as having more than one possible structure, the text is equivocal and meets the definition of syntactic ambiguity.
Contrast Syntactic ambiguity can be contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents multiple ways to infer the underlying structure of an entire sentence. The latter represents multiple ways to define individual words within a sentence. (Layman E. Allen "Some Uses of Symbolic Logic in Law Practice" 1962J M.U.L.L. 119, at 120; and L.E. Allen & M.E. Caldwell "Modern Logic and Judicial Decision Making: A Sketch of One View" in H.W. Baade (ed.) "Jurimetrics" Basic Books Inc., New York, USA, 1963, 213, at 228.). Examples Here are some examples: Bear left at zoo. (Do you turn left when you get to the zoo, or did someone leave a bear there?) I'm going to sleep. ("Going" can be a verb with destination "sleep" or an auxiliary indicating near future. There is little difference in meaning between the two parses.) The word of the Lord came to Zechariah, son of Berekiah, son of Iddo, the prophet. (Which of the three is the prophet?) British Left Waffles on Falklands (Did the British leave waffles behind, or was there waffling by the British Left?) The cow was found by a stream by a farmer. (The farmer found the cow; she was located by a stream.) Monty flies back to front. (Monty returns to the frontline; or Monty flies backwards?) A noteworthy example in the field of computer natural language processing is Time flies like an arrow. Although humans unambiguously understand it to mean "Time flies in the same way that an arrow does," it could also mean: (As Groucho Marx is said to have observed, "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.") In legal disputes, courts may be asked to interpret the meaning of syntactic ambiguities in statutes or contracts. In some instances, arguments asserting highly unlikely interpretations have been deemed frivolous. A detailed discussion of syntactic ambiguity is available at http://www.lawfoundation.net.au/ljf/site/articleIDs/63B6C5E2ABB6A511CA25714C000CFF37/$file/syntactic.pdf. | ||||||||
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