Синтаксическая неоднозначность и её проявления в языке

Sentences with structures permitting multiple possible interpretations
Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, The task of clarifying which meaning is actually intended from among the possibilities is known as syntactic disambiguation.

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 (i. e. word order) 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.

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 speech. 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.

Newspaper headlines are written in a telegraphic style (headlinese) which often omits the copula, creating syntactic ambiguity. A common form is the garden path type. The name crash blossoms was proposed for these ambiguous headlines by Danny Bloom in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group in August 2009. He based this on the headline "Violinist linked to JAL crash blossoms" that Mike O'Connell had posted, asking what such a headline could be called. The Columbia Journalism Review regularly reprints such headlines in its "The Lower Case" column, and has collected them in the anthologies "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim" and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge". Language Log also has an extensive archive of crash blossoms, for example "Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit". Many purported crash blossoms are apocryphal or recycled. One celebrated one from World War I is "French push bottles up German rear"; life imitated art in the Second World War headline "Eighth Army Push Bottles Up Germans".

Syntactic or structural ambiguities are frequently found in humour and advertising. One of the most enduring jokes supposedly originating with the famous comedian Groucho Marx was his quip that used an ambiguous modifier. "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". Significantly enough, 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.

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.

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.

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 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.

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.