What is an example of lexical ambiguity?

Lexical ambiguity is caused when two words have the same form (homonymy or homophony) or when a word has more than one meaning (polysemy). * A classic example of lexical ambiguity involves the word(s) bank. I went to the bank.

What are the examples of lexical?

In lexicography, a lexical item (or lexical unit / LU, lexical entry) is a single word, a part of a word, or a chain of words (catena) that forms the basic elements of a language’s lexicon (≈ vocabulary). Examples are cat, traffic light, take care of, by the way, and it’s raining cats and dogs.

What are some examples of ambiguity?

Ambiguous words or statements lead to vagueness and confusion, and shape the basis for instances of unintentional humor. For instance, it is ambiguous to say “I rode a black horse in red pajamas,” because it may lead us to think the horse was wearing red pajamas.

What are two forms of lexical ambiguity?

Two types of lexical ambiguity are traditionally distinguished: polysemy (one word with multiple senses) vs. homonymy (different words that happen to sound the same). Both cases involve an ambiguous word form; the difference lies in how the information is organized in the speaker’s mental lexicon.

What is an example of ambiguous sentence?

An ambiguous sentence has two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words. Problem: This sentence is ambiguous because it is not clear if Mr Smith was guilty of keeping the snake in the Magistrates Court, or guilty of keeping the snake after he caught it from a neighbour’s property.

How do you explain lexical ambiguity?

Lexical ambiguity is a writing error that occurs when a sentence contains a word that has more than one meaning. This problem, which is also called semantic ambiguity, obscures the writer’s intent and confuses the reader.

What is a lexical sentence?

The other component of sentence meaning is word meaning, the individual meanings of the words in a sentence, as lexical items. The concept of word meaning is a familiar one. Dictionaries list words and in one way or another state their meanings.

What is lexical verb and example?

(In this sentence, ‘will’ is auxiliary verb and ‘want’ is lexical verb as it shows main action of the subject). Examples of auxiliary verbs are like: may, be, was, is, had, has, have, could, would, can, did, might, etc. Examples of lexical verbs are like: run, laugh, see, think, want, act, pull, walk, go, make, etc.

What is language ambiguity?

Linguistic ambiguity is a quality of language that makes speech or written text open to multiple interpretations. Lexical ambiguity often occurs because words and phrases can have multiple meanings.

What is ambiguity in grammar?

In English grammar, syntactic ambiguity (also called structural ambiguity or grammatical ambiguity) is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words, as opposed to lexical ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word.

What is ambiguity in a sentence?

An ambiguous sentence has two or more possible meanings within a single sentence or sequence of words. This can confuse the reader and make the meaning of the sentence unclear.

What is a sentence for ambiguity?

This statement has a lot of ambiguity . She chose her clothing carefully to avoid gender ambiguity . The ambiguity cannot be cured. They found possible ambiguity in interpretation.

What are examples of ambiguous words?

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word ‘light’, for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like ‘light’, ‘note’, ‘bear’ and ‘over’ are lexically ambiguous.

What are some examples of ambiguous sentences?

A good life depends on a liver – Liver may be an organ or simply a living person.

  • or foreigners are being spoken of as dogs.
  • or a duck that is a bird.
  • What does lexical ambiguity mean?

    Lexical ambiguity is the presence of two or more possible meanings for a single word. It’s also called semantic ambiguity or homonymy. It differs from syntactic ambiguity, which is the presence of two or more possible meanings within a sentence or sequence of words.

    What is an example of an ambiguous statement?

    Ambiguous words or statements lead to vagueness and confusion, and shape the basis for instances of unintentional humor. For instance, it is ambiguous to say “I rode a black horse in red pajamas,” because it may lead us to think the horse was wearing red pajamas.