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What Are the Main Types of Ambiguity?
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Introduction
Languages are essential tools for human to communicate with each other and record and transfer
information everyday; it is difficult to imagine the situation without language delivery. However, a natural
language is not so perfectly designed to transfer all the information in an expected way. More or less, some
flaws in a language are inevitable, such as the ambiguity of a language which causes confusion in people's
common utterances. Generally speaking, there are often certain ambiguous words and sentences appearing
in human's utterances and acquiring more precise clarification from speakers. Different interpretations of
the same utterance may result in various interpretations and the difficulty of comprehension of listeners. It
is, actually, a quite common phenomenon among different languages.
The purpose of this essay is to identify the types of ambiguity because sometimes it could be confusing in
itself and with other phenomena. Therefore, this essay attempts to focus on explaining the basic types of
ambiguity after a brief definition and some distinctions from other similar linguistic phenomena which are
vagueness and deixis. Among the main content about ambiguity types, it will provide definitions of each type
of ambiguity, namely, lexical ambiguity, structural ambiguity, a combination of lexical and structural
ambiguity and scope ambiguity.

A Brief Definition
A simple definition from Chierchia and McConnell (1990: 32) is that 'ambiguity arises when a single word or
string of words is associated in the language system with more than one meaning'. That means a sentence
can be interpreted in different ways and it may be caused by multiple meanings of one word - lexical
ambiguity, by different structures of a sentence - structural ambiguity, by a combination of lexical and
structural ambiguity or by different semantic scope - scope ambiguity. Examples can be seen as below:

(1)
(2)
(3) (Chierchia and McConnell 1990: 32)
(4) (Heim and Kratzer 1998: 194)
Types of Ambiguity
1. Lexical ambiguity
This type of ambiguity, in written texts, results from multiple meanings of a word, and in spoken language,
results from different word forms of the same sounds. With respect to a written text, in a sentence e.g. (1),
the word bank can refer to a slope side of a river or a business establishment. Another example is like (5).

(5) (Hurford and Heasley 1983:128)

The word captain has one meaning of 'the person in command of a ship, aircraft, or spacecraft' or another
meaning of 'a leader of a team or group' (Longman Group UK 1998: 202), so this sentence may be also
ambiguous without context. For further explanation, there are two reasons for multiple meanings of a word.
One is owing to homonyms which have entirely different meanings but share the identical word form, e.g. in
(1) where the two meanings of bank are irrelative; these two banks are two lexemes in a linguistic view. The
other one is due to polysemy (Cann 1993) which means the meanings of the same word are relevant but still
different to certain extent, for example, in (5) captain includes different interpretations which all refer to a
role of a leader.

As for spoken language (Wikipedia 2004), ambiguity is caused by either homophones which share the
identical sounds with different meanings, or more than one way of breaking up a set of sounds into words.
For instance, draft and draught are homophones which probably result in certain ambiguity; an example
(Gerald, K 2000) for the second situation is as following.

(6) a.
b.

As can be seen, (6a) is probably interpreted as (6b) because these two sentences have the same phonemic
transcription, considering the change in connected speech of spoken language,
In fact, most of this ambiguity does not cause a problem in a discourse, for readers or listeners can
speculate the meaning which the writers or speakers want to express with the context. Furthermore, some
writers and spearkers use this kind of ambiguity as an element of literature to make a sentence more
meaningfully.

(7) (Wikipedia 2004)

This is a song title where blue may refer to both the color and sadness. Therefore, there are two forms of
lexical ambiguity, of which one is in written language, mainly caused by homonyms and polesemy, and the
other one is in spoken language mainly caused by homophones.

2. Structural ambiguity
Structural ambiguity refers to the situation in which 'a sentence may have different meanings because the
words of a sentence are related to each other in various ways, even though each word is clear' (Hurford and
Heasley 1983: 128). A sentence like (2) illustrates two different possibilities - one is that Ted saw a girl with
his glasses; the other one is that Ted saw a girl with her glasses. Distinguishing from lexical ambiguity, all
the words in this sentence are clear on their individual meanings. Thus, a simple test for differentiating
these two types is that the sentence which includes more than one structure trees without individually
ambiguous words is a structurally ambiguous sentence. Hence, two distinct structure trees of (2) are shown
as following:

However, such ambiguity does not always cause a problem in comprehension. Receivers sometimes could
use background knowledge to interpret some ambiguous sentences as some examples from Semantics
(Saeed 2003:193)
(8)

(9)
(10)

Probably, (8) is still ambiguous since readers can not decide whether John took the stick or the dog did;
nevertheless, it is clear that the white tail should be with the dog in (9) and the trombone should be carried
by John in (10). Although these three sentences have the same identically ambiguous structure in theory,
they can be clearly predicted in practice.

3. A combination of lexical and structural ambiguity

This type of ambiguity presents properties of both lexical and structural ambiguity, which means that it has
not only an ambiguous word or words but also has more than one possible syntactic structure. Taking (3)
for example, duck is an ambiguous word which could be interpreted as a noun - 'a common swimming bird'
or a verb - 'to lower (one's head of body) quickly' (Longman Group UK 1998: 459). As far as the syntactic
category of duck is changed, the structure of this sentence is correspondingly affected. Thus, in the former
situation, Mary claimed that John saw her when she ducked and duck is the complement of the object her,
while in the latter one, Mary claimed that John saw the duck which belonged to her, so duck is the direct
object and her is a determiner.

This type of ambiguity is not often considered as one of the main types by some linguists (e.g. Cann 1993,
Hurford and Heasley 1983 and Saeed 2003) because it is an extreme example of lexical ambiguity or
structural ambiguity; whereas, Chierchia and McConnell (1990) explicitly listed this type in their analysis,
perhaps because it is inappropriate to classify this combination into either type. For the same reason, it is
listed separately in this essay.

4. Scope ambiguity
This is the final sort of ambiguity which is caused by the possibility of different semantic scope in a
sentence (Cann 1993). To be more precise, there is no ambiguity in single words or the surface structure;
whereas, the semantic scope is indefinite due to other elements, for instance, qualification and negation.
The sentence (4) is one of the examples caused by qualifier that none of the words have ambiguous
meanings and the syntactic structure, at least, the surface structure is clear. However, the doubt is how
many representatives have been sent to those meetings for there might be the same representative a being
sent to each meeting (namely A, B, C, D, etc.) in turn or each representative (namely a, b, c, d, etc.) being sent
to each of the meetings (namely A, B, C, D, etc.). In another word, one representative has different semantic
scope here. In another example such as (11), it is ambiguous because of negative word not

(11)
So there are two interpretations for this sentence - either all the people didn't attend the meeting or not all
the people attend the meeting. Negation word not can affect the quantifier everyone or the predicate did
attend.

The reason of an emphasis on the identical surface structure of a sentence with scope ambiguity as
mentioned above is that their deep structures are actually different although they have the same surface
structure. Moreover, it is also the reason why some linguists argue that scope ambiguity does present
different structures in a deep level, so distinct structures is not a symbol for recognizing structural ambiguity
(Chierchia and McConnell 1990). Nonetheless, the structures in structural and scope ambiguity are still
relatively different; the syntactic structure does not play such an important role in interpreting semantic
scope and the different deep structures still have the same surface structure, which differentiates from the
distinct surface structures in structural ambiguity. Thus, scope ambiguity could be considered as an
independent ambiguity type.

The Distinction from Vagueness and Deixis

It is necessary to distinguish vagueness and deixis while typology of ambiguity is concerned because they
have distinct ways of presenting unclear meanings. So they are two different phenomena from ambiguity
and should not be included into ambiguity.

Vagueness is a matter of the relative looseness or of the nonspecificity of interpretation (Huang 2004). For
example, in (12) there is no lexical, structural or scope ambiguity which could cause doubt in
comprehension, but a small animal is not specified to a definite animal such as a cat or a dog. It only
provides a general description about the animal.

(12)

Deixis is another matter about semantic reference. In the definition by Peter Mathews (1997: 89), 'it is the
way in which the reference of certain elements in a sentence is determined in relation to a specific speaker
and addressee, a specific time and place in utterance'. In other words, the deictic word has uncertain
implications because of its changeable reference. Taking I for example, the word I may refer to speaker at
that moment; thus, John can use I when he speaks and so does Mary. The sentence (13) does not provide
the definite date with the reference to tomorrow unless listeners or readers assume the day after whenever
he or she receives this information.

(13)

However, sometimes it is difficult to clearly differentiate ambiguity from vagueness and deixis and probably
certain sentences might include combined elements. But detailed analysis will not be omitted due to the
different focus on this essay. The point made here is that vagueness and deixis are two distinct situation
and inappropriate to be mixed with ambiguity.

Conclusion
To sum up, this essay, with relatively simple analysis, basically talked about the types of ambiguity which is
an important component in studies of semantics. These four types, namely, lexical ambiguity, structural
ambiguity and scope ambiguity and a controversial type - the combination of lexical and structural
ambiguity all have their own properties although it is not easy to distinguish them very clearly sometimes.
Another interesting point is that the spoken lexical ambiguity is also a kind of lexical ambiguity although it is
not very often mentioned in books. Furthermore, generally speaking, ambiguity is different from vagueness
and deixis because those two are able to present distinct semantic situation; however, they are not always
absolutely unrelated to ambiguity. An additionally essential emphasis is that the variety of ambiguous
examples presented here can cause problems probably because the context or background knowledge is
deliberately omitted for the research purpose. Actually, ambiguous sentences and words can be very often
interpreted in an accurate way when they are used in reality; moreover, writers and speakers also use this
characteristic of ambiguity to make an artistic impact on their language, as this has been mentioned in
previous paragraphs.

Finally, as Cann (1993:1) said in his book, 'a semantic theory must be able to predict the ambiguities in the
expressions of a language'. However, some of its aspects are not quite clear-cut even though certain
complex means of description have been applied, so ambiguity is still an interesting and complicated topic
worthy of further discussion.

References
Cann, R. 1993. Formal Semantics: an introduction. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Chierchia, G. and McConnell-Ginet, S. 1990. Meaning and Grammar: an introduction to Semantics.
Massachusetts: Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Gerald, K. 2000. Teach Pronunciation. Essex: Person Education Limited.
Heim, I. and Kratzer, A. 1998. Semantics in Generative Grammar. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers Ltd.
Huang, Y. 2004. Foundation Semantics: MA Module Materials. Reading: SLALS, The University of
Reading.
Hurford, R.S. and B. Heasley 1983. Semantics: A coursebook. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Longman Group UK 1998. Longman Dictionary of Contemporary English. Beijing: The commercial Press
and Addison Wesley Longman China limited.
Matthews, P. H. 1997. The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Saeed, J. 2003. Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell
Wikipedia. 2004. Ambiguity. [Online] available from a
href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ambiguity