Syntactic ambiguity, also called amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted

in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure.

Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the
words and clauses 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 meets the definition of syntactic ambiguity.
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.
Example
The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose. Henry VI (1.4.30), by Shakespeare
Amphiboly occurs frequently in poetry, owing to the alteration of the natural order of words for metrical reasons. The
sentence could be taken to mean that Henry will depose the duke, or that the duke will depose Henry.
Eduardum occidere nolite timere bonum est. Edward II by Marlowe
According to legend, Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March, famously plotted to murder Edward II
of England in such a way as not to draw blame on themselves, sending a famous order in Latin which, depending on
where the comma was inserted, could mean either "Do not be afraid to kill Edward; it is good" or "Do not kill Edward;
it is good to fear":
I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola. Lola by Ray Davies
Can mean "Lola and I are both glad I'm a man", or "I'm glad Lola and I are both men", or "I'm glad I'm a man, and Lola
is also glad to be a man". Ray Davies deliberately wrote this ambiguity into the song, referring to a cross-dresser.
John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope.
Who has the telescope? John, the man on the mountain, or the mountain?
Flying planes can be dangerous.
Either the act of flying planes is dangerous, or planes that are flying are dangerous.
The word of the Lord came to Zechariah, son of Berekiah, son of Iddo, the prophet.
Is the prophet Zechariah or Iddo?
Aristotle writes about an influence of ambiguities on arguments and also about an influence of ambiguities depending
on either combination or division of words:
Ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness are terms used in cognitive semantics referring to different instances of plurality of
meaning. According to Deane (1988) these three phenomena form a gradient between total semantic identity
(vagueness) and total semantic distinctness (p. 327) (ambiguity). Therefore, polysemy is a case somewhere in between
these two extremes. The borders between the categories of ambiguity, polysemy and vagueness are fuzzy. Thus, there
are lexical examples that can be assigned to more than one category.
Ambiguity

Ambiguity is a term used to characterise phenomena that have more than only one meaning. These meanings are distinct
from each other and have no close schema in common. That is why a single expression may lead to multiple
interpretations. In natural language many words, strings of words and sentences are ambiguous, simply because of the
fact that numerous words cover several distinct meanings, or specific structural elements give rise to different readings.
That means that an expression or utterance is ambiguous if it can be interpreted in more than one way (Lbner 2002: p.
39). However, disregarding puns (see 1.5), in every linguistic situation only one meaning of an ambiguous expression can
be used. There are several forms of ambiguity to be distinguished according to their trigger:
Lexical Ambiguity
Lexical ambiguity is concerned with multiple interpretations of lexemes. A word is ambiguous if it involves two lexical items
that have identical forms, but have distinct, i.e. unrelated meanings. There are numerous examples of lexical ambiguity. A
clear-cut one is the lexeme ball. This word may either denote the round object which is used for several sports, like
football, volleyball or basketball, or it can be used to refer to a large formal dancing party. Both forms are identically
written and pronounced but just accidentally share the same form: ball in the sense of the round object originates in the
Old Norse word ballr, whereas ball as the formal event comes from Greek ballizar (meaning to dance) and was first
attested in the English language in the 1630s being introduced through Old French. (Online Etymological Dictionary)
Another example by Chierchia & McConnell-Ginet (1993) is the following sentence: You should have seen the bull we got
from the Pope. The sentence is ambiguous, because the word bull may stand for several distinct things either a male
animal of different kinds, a swearword or an official order or statement from the Pope. As ambiguity is context dependent
lexical disambiguation (knowing which word meaning has been used) is quite easy in most cases when considering
previous expectations and context (p. 32).
The most classical example of lexical ambiguity is bank, which may either denote an organisation providing financial
services, or the side of a river just to mention two of the lexemes possible meanings.
Further examples of lexical ambiguity are:
bright - a bright (intelligent) person vs. bright (sunny) weather
file - arranged collection of papers vs. metal tool
Structural Ambiguity
Structural ambiguity is a result of two or more different syntactic structures that can be attributed to one string of words.
That means that a sentence is structurally ambiguous not because it contains a single lexeme that has several distinct
meanings, but because the syntactic structure of the sentence causes multiple interpretations.
(1) Young boys and girls love the adventure playground.
This sentence is syntactically ambiguous, because the reference of young is unclear. There are two possible
interpretations of the subject. It may either be that [young boys] and girls love the adventure playground, or young [boys
and girls] love [it]. The structural analysis shows that the sentence may be interpreted in a way that young only refers to
the boys, or it may be understood as characterising the boys as well as the girls.
(2) Flying planes can be dangerous.
This often quoted example of structural (also called syntactic) ambiguity comes from Noam Chomsky. Sentences that
contain lexemes that change their word form or even word class depending on the sentences interpretation are part of
this category. Flying planes in this example sentence may be understood as to fly planes as well as planes, which fly.
Therefore, the lexeme flying can be interpreted as the gerund form of a verb in a verb phrase, or as an attribute of a noun
phrase.
There are several linguists, who have come up with similar examples like the last one. Lyons (1975) (cf. pp. 212f.) as well
as Langacker (1993) (cf. p. 432), for example, determine those instances as grammatically ambiguous. The terms
structural, syntactic and grammatical ambiguity are basically interchangeable.
Lyons examples for grammatical ambiguity are the following:
(3) They can fish.
The ambiguous interpretation is a result of the double classification of fish (either intransitive verb or noun) as well as of
can (either auxilliary or transitive verb).
(4) beautiful girls dress
This is an example similar to the first one of structural ambiguity. It is a question of reference and therefore, may either be
understood as [beautiful girls] dress or beautiful [girls dress]. Is the adjectivebeautiful attributed to the girl or to the dress?
That question makes the reading of the sentence ambiguous.
However, Lyons points out that these cases of free interpretation are hardly leading to misinterpreations in natural
language use. It usually gets quite obvious which meaning is aimed at through the rest of the sentence and the context.
Transformational Ambiguity
The category of transformational ambiguity is mentioned by Lyons (1975), who characterises its prototypes as
ambiguous constructions which depend upon the deeper connexions (p. 249). Furthermore, he points out that these
constructions are mostly only ambiguous out of context. One of his examples is the phrase the love of God. Isolated from
any textual relations it is unclear whetherGod is the subject or the object in this noun phrase. Additionally, Lyons quotes
Chomskys already mentioned example of flying planes, which he in contrast to other linguists counts as belonging to
transformational ambiguity. Basically, neither categorisation is wrong as many linguists do not distinguish transformational
from grammatical ambiguity. Thus, transformational ambiguity is a subcategory of grammatical ambiguity.
Another Chomskian example mentioned by Lyons is: the shooting of the hunters. This is the same case as the God-
example: it is unclear whether the hunters are subject or object in this phrase.
Scope Ambiguity
A further type of ambiguity called scope ambiguity is discussed by Chierchia and McConnell-Ginet(1993), among others. It
is a subcategory of structural ambiguity. However, scope ambiguity can be distinguished from structural ambiguity through
its single surface syntactic structure (p. 33). Chierchia and McConnell-Ginets example for this subcategory is: Someone
loves everyone. This sentence can either mean Everyone is loved by (at least) one person. or There is a person and this
person loves everyone. Note that in the former case someone may denote several different individuals, whereas it is only
one single individual in the latter case.
Pun
A pun is a special form of ambiguity (mostly lexical) that is consciously used to create statements with ambiguous
distinct meanings. That means that a pun is a play with words involving and creating double contexts (cf. Tuggy 1993:
pp. 168, 178). Puns in spoken discourse make use of homophones, and puns in written discourse utilize homographs.
Punning is a useful tool for jokes, creating at least two meanings mostly a literal as well as a figurative one. Here is one
example: After he ate the duck, the alligator got a little down in the mouth.
Vagueness
Tuggy (1993) offers a classical definition of vagueness. He characterises it as a linguistic phenomenon, where two or
more meanings associated with a given phonological form are [] united as non-distinguished subcases of a single, more
general meaning (p. 167). That means that vagueness involves a lexeme with a single but nonspecific meaning (ibid., p.
168).
Typical examples of vagueness are kinship terms, e.g. child, as well as lexemes with flexible boundaries, e.g. gradable
adjectives like tall (cf. Lbner 2002: p. 45). An utterance like Its my childs birthday tomorrow. is vague, because the
lexeme child is vague. There are two possible instantinations, namely [a female human under 18] and [a male human
under 18]. When receiving such an uttereance it is much more likely that the common schema [a human under 18] is
activated instead of its instantiations.
The lexeme tall in the statement He is a tall man. is vague as well. Tall belongs to the group of gradable adjectives.
Therefore, the boundaries of the category tall are flexible depending on the context it is used in. From the perspective of a
little child, a 5-foot-tall man will be considered tall. But the same man will not be considered with the same quality tall
from the perspective of a 6-foot-tall woman. Thus, categorisations of this kind are always matter of norms (cf. Lbner
2002: p. 195).
Polysemy
On a scale of meaning variance ambiguity and vagueness are the two extremes, whereas polysemy is in between the
other two. It shares features with both and is a common phenomenon in everyday language use. Polysemy involves
lexemes that are clearly united (share a common schema) as well as clearly seperable at the same time. Polysemous
words are the result of lexemes gaining new usages over time which share the same phonological form and appear to
have separate meanings to non-etymologists. Foot is one example of polysemy. There are distinct usages of the word
either as a body part or as a scale unit (1 foot = 30.48 centimetres). Even though it appears that these are two very
different meanings, both forms go back to the Old English word fot. Other examples of polysemy are earth (the planet vs.
ground/ soil) and brother (kinship term vs. term of address for a male person living in a cloister).
Polysemy is sometimes mixed up with homonymy. However, as e.g. Langacker (1991) points out, there is a clear-cut
distinction between these two (p. 268). Polysemous lexems always share the same etymological background and/or are
conceived of as being semantically related by speakers, whereas homonymous words just happen to end up with the
same phonological form. Therefore, homonymy may be seen as a subcategory of lexical ambiguity. Some linguists, like
Lbner (cf. 2002: p. 39), claim the same for polysemy.
Metaphorical uses of words are instances of polysemy as well. The foot of a mountain, for example, makes use of the
polysemous lexeme foot and denotes the bottom part of the mountain, just as a persons foot refers to the bottom part of
the human body.