Ambiguity in Language

Ambiguity in language occurs where a word, phrase, or sentence can have multiple meanings or interpretations. It is an unavoidable feataure of language and is the basis for much of our humor. Two major forms of this are structural ambiguity and lexical ambiguity.

Structural Ambiguity

Structural ambiguity occurs when the syntax of a sentence can be interpreted in multiple ways. One example of this is “I shot an elephant in my pajamas,” discussed here.

News headlines like to remove words from sentences, making the potential for confusion much greater. when this happens, it’s often called a “crash blossom.” Here’s one of my favorites:

“INFANT PULLED FROM WRECKED CAR INVOLVED IN SHORT POLICE PURSUIT”
(KMOV St. Louis, quoted by Ben Zimmer at Lanuage Log)

This sentence’s intended reading was that “an infant was pulled from a wrecked car which had been involved in a short police persuit.” However, it is quite easy to misread it as “an infant who was pulled from a wrecked car was also involved in a short police pursuit.” The pursuit was short, I assume, because the infant couldn’t out-crawl the police.

Lexical Ambiguity

Another kind of ambiguity is lexical ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word can be interpreted as one of multiple homonyms, thus changing the meaning of a sentence. Here is a great example:

“‘Do you believe in clubs for young people?’ someone asked W.C. Fields.
‘Only when kindness fails,’ replied Fields.”
(Quoted by Graeme Ritchie in “The Linguistic Analysis of Jokes”)

In this joke, the word “clubs” is intended to mean organizations or groups that said young people could participate in. However, it is interpreted to mean a blunt weapon with which one would hit the young people.

Both?

Often, there are cases where lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity work together or where one causes the other. I’m not sure if there is a name for it, but my favorite example is this story about a panda:

“This panda walked into a tea shop and ordered a salad and ate it. Then it pulled out a pistol, shot the man at the next table dead, and walked out. Everyone rushed after it, shouting, ‘Stop! Stop! Why did you do that?’ ‘Because I’m a panda,’ said the panda. ‘That’s what pandas do. If you don’t believe me, look in the dictionary.’ So they looked in the dictionary and sure enough they found Panda: Raccoon-like animal of Asia. Eats shoots and leaves.”
(Ursula K. Le Guin, “The Panda Story”)

In this example there is lexical ambiguity (“shoots” and “leaves” could be either nouns or verbs) as well as structural ambiguity (is “eats” intransitive, or does it take “shoots and leaves” as its direct object?). The latter is caused by the former, and if we replace “shoots and leaves” with an equivalent noun phrase like “bamboo and vegetables,” it removes the ambiguity completely.