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.
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").[2]
Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law, because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance
1. Types of ambiguity
Although people are sometimes said to be ambiguous in how they use language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic expressions. A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. Obviously this definition does not say what meanings are or what it is for an expression to have one (or more than one). For a particular language, this information is provided by a grammar, which systematically pairs forms with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one meaning (see MEANING and SEMANTICS).
There are two types of ambiguity, lexical and structural. Lexical ambiguity is by far the more common. Everyday examples include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit', verbs like 'call', 'draw' and 'run', and adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'. There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'. Evidence that the word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and 'one' to a legal action.
Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence
has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history
teacher', 'a student of high moral principles' and 'short men and women',
and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives
can be boring'. These ambiguities are said to be structural because each
such phrase can be represented in two structurally different ways, e.g.,
'[Tibetan history] teacher' and 'Tibetan [history teacher]'. Indeed, the
existence of such ambiguities provides strong evidence for a level of underlying
syntactic structure (see SYNTAX). Consider the structurally
ambiguous sentence, 'The chicken is ready to eat', which could be used to
describe either a hungry chicken or a broiled chicken. It is arguable that
the operative reading depends on whether or not the implicit subject of
the infinitive clause 'to eat' is tied anaphorically to the subject ('the
chicken') of the main clause.2. Ambiguity contrasted
It is a platitude that what your words convey 'depends on what you mean'. This suggests that one can mean different things by what one says, but it says nothing about the variety of ways in which this is possible. Semantic ambiguity is one such way, but there are others: homonymy (mentioned above), vagueness, relativity, indexicality, nonliterality, indirection and inexplicitness. All these other phenomena illustrate something distinct from multiplicity of linguistic meaning.
3. Philosophical relevance
Philosophical distinctions can be obscured by unnoticed ambiguities. So it is important to identify terms that do doubtle duty. For example, there is a kind of ambiguity, often described as the 'act/object' or the 'process/product' ambiguity, exhibited by everyday terms like 'building', 'shot' and 'writing'. Confusions in philosophy of language and mind can result from overlooking this ambiguity in terms like 'inference', 'statement' and 'thought'. Another common philosophical ambiguity is the type/token distinction. Everyday terms like 'animal', 'book' and 'car' apply both to types and to instances (tokens) of those types. The same is true of linguistic terms like 'sentence', 'word' and 'letter' and to philosophically important terms like 'concept', 'event' and 'mental state' (see TYPE/TOKEN DISTINCTION).
Although unnoticed ambiguities can create philosophical problems, ambiguity is philosophically important also because philosophers often make spurious claims of it. Indeed, the linguist Charles Ruhl has argued that certain ostensible ambiguities, including act/object and type/token, are really cases of lexical underdetermination. Saul Kripke laments the common strategem, which he calls 'the lazy man's approach in philosophy', of appealing to ambiguity to escape from a philosophical quandary, and H. P. Grice urges philosophers to hone the 'Modified Occam's Razor: senses are not to be multiplied beyond necessity'. He illustrates its value by shaving a sense off the logical connective 'or', which is often thought to have both an inclusive and exclusive sense.
okey, that's the explaination about the ambiguity in semantics, I hope it useful. see you next week..
Thanks to : https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity & http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/ambguity.html
for the references.
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