What is meant by ambiguous words?

Ambiguous has, like many words in English, more than one possible meaning; a quality some might refer to as ambiguous itself. This word may mean “doubtful or uncertain especially from obscurity or indistinctness,” “capable of being understood in two or more possible senses or ways,” and “inexplicable.”

How do you know if a word is ambiguous?

In general terms, a word is ambiguous if its intended meaning is in some way unclear to the reader. There are three main reasons why this can happen: The meaning of the word is imprecise or open to more than one interpretation.

What is meant by syntactic ambiguity?

Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. …

How ambiguous is the structural ambiguity?

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The ambiguity, however, can be noticed if one really has a linguistic knowledge on how to analyze the phrase or sentence. Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure.

Which of the following expressions are structurally ambiguous and in what way a These are designed for small boys and girls?

The rule can be improved by replacing “noun” with “noun phrase” to be able to generate both with Mary and with a woman. Do phrase structure rules represent deep structure or surface structure?

What is a structurally ambiguous sentence?

Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure. The phrase can be disambiguated by putting it in a sentence with some sort of formal signals which help the reader or hearer to recognize the sentence structure.

What is ambiguous construction?

When ambiguous language is given its exact and technical meaning, and no other equitable considerations or reasonable implications are made, there has been a strict or literal construction of the unclear term.

Why should ambiguous words be avoided?

If parties are not on the same page and do not understand each other, they will be unsatisfied and the ties hardly ever will last. To communicate avoiding ambiguity is essential when you deal with a digital agency and want to explain the requirements for your project.

What is deep structure in linguistics?

In transformational and generative grammar, deep structure (also known as deep grammar or D-structure) is the underlying syntactic structure—or level—of a sentence. Deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules, and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

Does phrase structure represent deep structure or surface structure?

Deep structures are generated by phrase-structure rules, and surface structures are derived from deep structures by a series of transformations.

What is wrong with following rule of English syntactic structure?

What is wrong with the following rule of English syntactic structure? “A prepositional phrase is formed with a preposition followed by a noun.” This rule will produce both grammatical structures (with Mary), but also ungrammatical structures (*with woman), which is undesirable in terms of the “all and only” criterion.

What is structural ambiguity?

With structural ambiguity, it is the combinations of words that can be interpreted in more than one way or the structure of the sentence that allows for more than one meaning. To continue with a different type of fowl, consider this sentence:

What makes a sentence structurally ambiguous?

When a sentence or clause can be interpreted in more than one way because of the way it is constructed, it structurally ambiguous. The ambiguity or confusion comes from the way the sentence is put together – the order of the words – and not from the definition of the words.

What is an example of syntactically ambiguous?

Using Speech Cues to Decipher Syntactic Ambiguity. “Some sentences are syntactically ambiguous at the global level, in which case the whole sentence has two or more possible interpretations. For example, ‘They are cooking apples’ is ambiguous because it may or may not mean that apples are being cooked.

What is the ambiguity of the word ‘cooking’?

The ambiguity is whether the word “cooking” is being used as an adjective or a verb. If it’s an adjective, “they” refers to the apples and “cooking” identifies the type of apples being discussed.