Syntactic ambiguity

Globally ambiguous A globally ambiguous sentence is one that has at least two distinct interpretations and where reading the entire sentence does not resolve the ambiguity. Globally ambiguous sentences exist where no feature of the representation (e.g., word order and/or grammatical inflection) distinguishes the possible distinct interpretations. Global ambiguities are often unnoticed because readers tend to choose the interpretation they understand to be more probable. One example of a global ambiguity is "The woman held the baby in the green blanket." In this example, the baby, incidentally wrapped in the green blanket, is being held by the woman, or the woman is using the green blanket as an instrument to hold the baby, or the woman is wrapped in the green blanket and holding the baby. Locally ambiguous A locally ambiguous sentence is a sentence that contains an ambiguous phrase but has only one interpretation. The ambiguity in a locally ambiguous sentence briefly stays and is resolved, i.e., disambiguated, by the end of the sentence. Sometimes, local ambiguities can result in garden-path sentences, in which a structurally correct sentence is difficult to interpret because one interpretation of the ambiguous region is not the one that makes most sense. ==Examples==

:"The duke yet lives that Henry shall depose." — Henry VI (1.4.30), by William Shakespeare :*Henry will depose the duke. :*The duke will depose Henry. ::Amphiboly occurs frequently in poetry, sometimes owing to the alteration of the natural order of words for metrical reasons. :"" — Edward II by Christopher Marlowe :: Isabella of France and Roger Mortimer, 1st Earl of March supposedly plotted to murder Edward II of England in such a way as not to draw blame on themselves, sending this order in Latin which changes meaning depending on where the comma is placed. :* Do not be afraid to kill Edward; it is good. (either killing Edward or not being afraid to kill him is good) :* Do not kill Edward; it is good to fear. (The act of killing Edward is good to fear) :"I'm glad I'm a man, and so is Lola" from the song "Lola" by the Kinks (written by Ray Davies) :*Lola and I are both glad I'm a man. :*I'm glad I'm a man, and Lola is also a man. :*I'm glad I'm a man, and Lola is also glad to be a man. :"John saw the man on the mountain with a telescope." :*John, using a telescope, saw a man on a mountain. :*John saw a man on a mountain which had a telescope on it. :*John saw a man on a mountain who had a telescope. :*John, on a mountain and using a telescope, saw a man. :*John, on a mountain, saw a man who had a telescope. :"The word of the Lord came to Zechariah, son of Berekiah, son of Iddo, the prophet." – Zechariah 1:7 :*... the prophet Zechariah, who was the son of Berekiah, who was the son of Iddo :*... Zechariah, who was the son of the prophet Berekiah, who was the son of Iddo :*... Zechariah, who was the son of Berekiah, who was the son of the prophet Iddo :*... the prophet Zechariah, who was the son of Berekiah and Iddo :*... Zechariah, who was the son of Berekiah and Iddo, the prophet :Lesbian Vampire Killers, the title of a 2009 comedy-horror film :* Lesbians who kill vampires. :* Killers of lesbian vampires. :* Lesbian vampires that are killers. :"The Purple People Eater", a 1958 novelty song by Sheb Wooley :* A purple creature that eats people. :* A creature that eats purple people. (This interpretation is confirmed in the lyrics, although whether the creature itself is also purple is never made clear.) :"British Left Waffles on Falkland Islands", a 1982 headline in The Guardian :* The left-leaning British political party is indecisive about Falkland Island policy. :* British people are responsible for leaving waffles (the breakfast item) on the Falkland Islands. Aristotle writes about an influence of ambiguities on arguments and also about this influence depending on either combination or division of words: ==In headlines==

Newspaper headlines are often written in headlinese, a compressed register that frequently omits function words such as the copula. This omission can create syntactic ambiguity, often in the form of garden-path sentences, in which an initial interpretation turns out to be incorrect. The term crash blossom was coined by Dan Bloom in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group to describe such headlines. The name comes from the headline "Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms" which initially appears to describe a Japan Air Lines plane crash involving "blossoms", rather than a violinist whose career blossomed after being linked to the crash. The Columbia Journalism Review has reprinted crash blossom headlines in the column "The Lower Case" and has published anthologies of them called "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim" and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge". The Language Log blog has an extensive archive of crash blossoms, including: • "Woman burned as a baby tracks down nurse who cared for her" – Chicago Tribune, 2015 • "Knife crime: St John Ambulance to teach teens to help stab victims" – BBC News, 2021 • "Driving waste and recycling innovation for the world" – ad for University of New South Wales, 2019 • "German factory orders slide unexpectedly" – The Guardian, 2015 Many purported crash blossoms are apocryphal or recycled. One celebrated example from World War I is "French push bottles up German rear";, which was echoed in the Second World War headline "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans". ==In humour and advertising==

Syntactic or structural ambiguities are frequently found in humour and advertising. One enduring joke using an ambiguous modifier is a quip spoken by Groucho Marx in the 1930 film Animal Crackers: "I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got into my pajamas I don't know." Another sentence, which emerged from early 1960s machine translation research, is "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana". Structural ambiguities may also be intentionally created when one understands the kinds of syntactic structures that will lead to ambiguity; however, for the respective interpretations to work, they must be compatible with semantic and pragmatic contextual factors. ==Syntactic and semantic ambiguity==

In syntactic ambiguity, the same sequence of words is interpreted as having different syntactic structures. In contrast, in semantic ambiguity the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently. Controlled natural languages are often designed to be unambiguous so that they can be parsed into a logical form. ==Kantian==

Immanuel Kant employs the term "amphiboly" in a sense of his own, as he has done in the case of other philosophical words. He means it as a confusion of pure understanding with perceived experience, and an attribution to the latter of what belongs only to the former. ==Models==

Competition-based model Competition-based models hold that differing syntactic analyses rival each other when syntactic ambiguities are resolved. If probability and language constraints offer similar support for each one, especially strong competition occurs. On the other hand, when constraints support one analysis over the other, competition is weak and processing is easy. After van Gompel et al.'s experiments (2005), the reanalysis model has become favoured over competition-based models. Results of many experiments tracking the eye-movements of subjects have demonstrated that it is just as hard to process a persistently ambiguous sentence (1) as an unambiguous sentence (2 and 3) because information before the ambiguity only weakly leans towards each possible syntax. Consider the following statements: • "The maid of the princess who scratched herself in public was terribly humiliated." • "The son of the princess who scratched himself in public was terribly humiliated." • "The son of the princess who scratched herself in public was terribly humiliated." Research showed that people took less time to read persistently ambiguous sentences (sentence 1) than temporarily ambiguous sentences that were clarified later (sentences 2 and 3). In sentences 2 and 3, the reflexive pronouns "himself" and "herself" clarify that "who scratched" is modifying the son and the princess respectively. Thus, the readers are forced to reanalyse and their reading times will therefore rise. In sentence 1, however, the ambiguity of the reflexive pronoun "herself" fits both the maid and the princess. This means the readers do not have to reanalyse. Thus, ambiguous sentences will take a shorter time to read compared to clarified ones. This is called the underspecification account as readers do not stick to a meaning when not provided with clarifying words. The reader understands someone scratched herself but does not seek to determine whether it was the maid or the princess. This is also known as the "good-enough" approach to understanding language. == The good-enough approach ==

The good-enough approach to understanding language claims that representations of meaning are usually incomplete and language processing only partial. A good-enough interpretation may occur when such a representation is not robust, supported by context, or both and must handle potentially distracting information. Thus, such information is clipped for successful understanding. ==Differences in processing==

Children and adults Children interpret ambiguous sentences differently from adults due to lack of experience. Children have not yet learned how the environment and contextual clues can suggest a certain interpretation of a sentence. They have also not yet developed the ability to acknowledge that ambiguous words and phrases can be interpreted multiple ways. As children read and interpret syntactically ambiguous sentences, the speed at which initial syntactic commitments are made is lower in children than in adults. Furthermore, children appear to be less skilled at directing their attention back to the part of the sentence that is most informative in terms of aiding reanalysis. Other evidence attributes differences in interpreting ambiguous sentences to working memory span. While adults tend to have a higher working memory span, they sometimes spend more time resolving the ambiguity but tend to be more accurate in their final interpretation. Children, in contrast, can decide quickly on an interpretation because they consider only the interpretations their working memory can hold. Low reading span vs. high reading span adults For low reading span adults who had the worst verbal working memory, they took longer to process the sentences with the reduced relative clause compared to the relative clause and had similar times from inanimate or animate subjects. For high reading span subjects who had the best verbal working memory, they were overall faster than the low reading span subjects. Within the high reading span subjects, however, they responded faster to inanimate subjects and took longer to respond to animate subjects. This was because the animate subjects had a greater propensity to create a garden-path sentence because of (not despite) greater verbal working memory. This suggested that since the low reading span subjects had less cognitive resources, only syntactic cues could be processed while high reading span subjects had more cognitive resources and could thus get tripped up with the garden-path sentence. ==See also==