Look at the following sentences,
announcements and newspaper headlines:
* The teacher asked the student to come to the language laboratory with a laptop
* Pakistani head seeks arms
* Teacher strikes idle students
* Two ships collide, one dead
Listed above are perfect examples of ambiguity. Ambiguity can be
defined as ‘the presence of two or more possible meanings in any passage’. Ambiguous sentences lack clarity and lead to confusion or
unintended meaning.
The Oxford English Dictionary says of the 500 words used most in the English language, each have an average of 23 different meanings. A written statement could be interpreted in several ways because of the variance of word meanings in the English language.
Peter G Neumann showed that by placing the word ‘only’ in 15 different places in a sentence resulted in over 20 different interpretations. Other words like ‘never’, ‘should’, ‘nothing’, and ‘usually’ can mean different things when used differently in a sentence.
The three types of ambiguity are syntactic ambiguity (structure),
semantic ambiguity (meaning) and lexical ambiguity (part of speech).
Syntactic ambiguity can be
described with the following sentence: ‘The teacher asked the student to come to the language laboratory with a laptop’.
It conveys two different meanings: asking the student to come to the language lab which has a laptop. Asking the student to bring a laptop to the language lab.
How to resolve the ambiguity? If the intended meaning is ‘asking the student to bring a laptop to the laboratory’, then the sentence can be rewritten as follows: ‘The teacher asked the student to bring a laptop to the language laboratory’.
‘Pakistani head seeks arms’
describes semantic ambiguity.
The word ‘head’ can be interpreted as a noun meaning either chief or the anatomical head of a body. Likewise, the word ‘arms’ can be
interpreted as a plural noun meaning either weapons or body parts.
The ambiguity in the newspaper headline could be resolved with the term ‘army chief’ or any other equivalent term.
— rayanal@yahoo.co.uk