linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of human language. It is called a scientific study because it entails a comprehensive, systematic, objective, and precise analysis of all aspects of language, particularly its nature and structure. Ling ...

, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the amount of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. Like other kinds of

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...

, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by

context Context may refer to: * Context (language use), the relevant constraints of the communicative situation that influence language use, language variation, and discourse summary Computing * Context (computing), the virtual environment required to s ...

or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. The language itself is sometimes a contributing factor in the overall effect of semantic ambiguity, in the sense that the level of ambiguity in the context can change depending on whether or not a language boundary is crossed. '' Lexical ambiguity'' is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a

word A word is a basic element of language that carries an objective or practical meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no conse ...

morpheme A morpheme is the smallest meaningful Constituent (linguistics), constituent of a linguistic expression. The field of linguistics, linguistic study dedicated to morphemes is called morphology (linguistics), morphology. In English, morphemes are ...

is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called ''

polysemy Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a sign (e.g. a symbol, a morpheme, a word, or a phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word has a singl ...

''. For instance, the

English English usually refers to: * English language * English people English may also refer to: Peoples, culture, and language * ''English'', an adjective for something of, from, or related to England ** English national ...

"foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the

foot The foot ( : feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is a separate organ at the terminal part of the leg mad ...

of a person or the foot of a

pot Pot may refer to: Containers * Flowerpot, a container in which plants are cultivated * Pottery, ceramic ware made by potters * A type of cookware Places * Ken Jones Aerodrome, IATA airport code POT * Palestinian Occupied Territories, the W ...

. When an ambiguity instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called ''

homonymy In linguistics, homonyms are words which are homographs (words that share the same spelling, regardless of pronunciation), or homophones ( equivocal words, that share the same pronunciation, regardless of spelling), or both. Using this definition ...

''. For instance, the English word "row" can denote the action of rowing or to an arrangement of objects. In practice, polysemy and homonymy can be difficult to distinguish.

Phrases In syntax and grammar, a phrase is a group of words or singular word acting as a grammatical unit. For instance, the English expression "the very happy squirrel" is a noun phrase which contains the adjective phrase "very happy". Phrases can consi ...

and sentences can also be semantically ambiguous, particularly when there are multiple ways of semantically combining its subparts. For instance, the English sentence "Everybody isn't here" is ambiguous between an interpretation where not everybody is here and another interpretation where nobody is. This ambiguity is an example of

scope ambiguity In formal semantics, the scope of a semantic operator is the semantic object to which it applies. For instance, in the sentence "''Paulina doesn't drink beer but she does drink wine''," the proposition that Paulina drinks beer occurs within the sco ...

, a phenomenon widely studied in formal semantics. De re/de dicto ambiguity is another notable example of sentence-level ambiguity which has received much attention in linguistics and philosophy. In some analyses, such ambiguities are the semantic reflexes of syntactic ambiguities, though in other approaches they are not.

Notes

Semantics Lexical semantics Syntax Generative syntax Grammar {{semantics-stub