Syntactic ambiguity

We have seen, in syntactic analysis, sequences of words are grammatically structured. There are different ways of interpreting sequences of words, and each structure has a different interpretation. In syntactic ambiguity, syntax is unclear, not the word-level meaning. Here is an example of structural ambiguity:

  • The man saw the girl with the telescope. Here, the ambiguity is because it is not clear whether the man sees the girl, who has a telescope, or the man sees the girl by using telescope. This ambiguity is called prepositional phrase (PP) ambiguity.