Syntactic ambiguity

"Structural ambiguity" redirects here. Not to be confused with the ambiguity of protein structures.
"Amphibology" redirects here. Not to be confused with amphibiology, the study of amphibians.

Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity,[1] amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the varied meanings of individual words but rather from the relationships among words and clauses within a sentence, concealing interpretations beneath the word order. Consequently, a sentence presents as syntactically ambiguous when it permits reasonable derivation of several possible grammatical structures by an observer.

In jurisprudence, the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous phrases in statutory texts or contracts may be done by courts. Occasionally, claims based on highly improbable interpretations of such ambiguities are dismissed as being frivolous litigation and without merit.[citation needed] The term parse forest refers to the collection of all possible syntactic structures, known as parse trees, that can represent the ambiguous sentence's meanings.[2][3] The task of clarifying which meaning is actually intended from among the possibilities is known as syntactic disambiguation.[4]

  1. ^ Cite error: The named reference Dallin was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  2. ^ Billot, Sylvie, and Bernard Lang. "The structure of shared forests in ambiguous parsing." Proceedings of the 27th annual meeting on Association for Computational Linguistics. Association for Computational Linguistics, 1989.
  3. ^ Kurohashi, Sadao, and Makoto Nagao. "Building a Japanese parsed corpus while improving the parsing system." Proceedings of The 1st International Conference on Language Resources & Evaluation. 1998.
  4. ^ MacDonald, Maryellen C., Neal J. Pearlmutter, and Mark S. Seidenberg. "The lexical nature of syntactic ambiguity resolution Archived 2016-08-03 at the Wayback Machine." Psychological review 101.4 (1994): 676.