Definition and Examples of Syntactic Ambiguity

Definition and Examples of Syntactic Ambiguity In Englishâ grammar, syntactic equivocalness isâ the nearness of at least two potential implications inside a solitary sentence or grouping of words. Additionally called auxiliary uncertainty orâ grammatical equivocalness. Contrast and lexical ambiguityâ (the nearness of at least two potential implications inside a solitary word). The planned importance of a linguistically equivocal sentence can regularly (yet not generally) be controlled by setting. Models and Observations The teacher said on Monday he would give an exam.The chicken is prepared to eat.The robber undermined the understudy with the knife.Visiting family members can be boring.This morning I shot an elephant in my night wear. How he got in my night robe I dont know.(Groucho MarxA woman with a clipboard halted me in the road a few days ago. She stated, Can you save a couple of moments for malignancy inquire about? I stated, All right, however were not going to get much done.(English humorist Jimmy CarrPlanes can circumvent the world, iPhones can do a zillion things, yet people have not developed a machine that can debone a dairy animals or a chicken as effectively as an individual, says Alan Alanis, a JPMorgan Chase (JPM) analyst.(Bryan Gruley and Lucia Kassai, Brazilian Meatpacker JBS Wrangles the U.S. Meat Industry. Bloomberg Businessweek, September 19, 2013) Sorts of Ambiguity We can roughly arrange the sortsâ of vagueness found in sentences as follows: 1. Unadulterated syntactic ambiguity:old men and womenFrench silk underwear2. Semi syntactic ambiguity:The space traveler entered the environment again.a red pencil3. Lexico-syntactic ambiguity:We saw her duck.I saw the entryway open.4. Unadulterated lexical ambiguity:He arrived at the bank.What is his position? The announcement unadulterated syntactic uncertainty is implied vagueness in which the variation readings of a sentence include indistinguishable lexical units; the equivocalness is accordingly fundamentally an issue simply of the manner in which the components are assembled together.(D. A. Cruse, Lexical Semantics. Cambridge University Press, 1986 Utilizing Speech Cues to Decipher Syntactic AmbiguitySome sentences are grammatically equivocal at the worldwide level, in which case the entire sentence has at least two potential understandings. For instance, They are cooking apples is questionable in light of the fact that it could conceivably imply that apples are being cooked. . . .One of the manners by which audience members work out the syntactic or linguistic structure of spoken sentences is by utilizing prosodic signals as pressure, sound, etc. For instance, in the questionable sentence The elderly people sat on the seat, the ladies could conceivably be old. In the event that the ladies are not old, at that point the verbally expressed span of word men will be generally long and the focused on syllable in ladies will have a lofty ascent in discourse form. Neither of these prosodic highlights will be available if the sentence implies the ladies are old.(M. Eysenck and M. Keane, Cognitive Psychology. Taylor Francis, 2005 Vague StructuresSyntactic vagueness happens when an arrangement of words can be organized in elective manners that are predictable with the sentence structure of the language. For example, . . . [this word group] is vague: (1) a. John told the lady that Bill was dating. . . . In 1a, that Bill was dating could either be a relative proviso (as in John told the lady that Bill was dating an untruth) or a sentence supplement (as in John told the lady that Bill was dating a liar).(Patrizia Tabossi et al., Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution in Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umilt. MIT Press, 1994)