Consequently, a sentence presents as syntactically ambiguous when it permits reasonable derivation of several possible grammatical structures by an observer.
In jurisprudence, the interpretation of syntactically ambiguous phrases in statutory texts or contracts may be done by courts.
Occasionally, claims based on highly improbable interpretations of such ambiguities are dismissed as being frivolous litigation and without merit.
Globally ambiguous sentences exist where no feature of the representation (i.e. word order) distinguishes the possible distinct interpretations.
The name crash blossoms was proposed for these ambiguous headlines by Danny Bloom in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group in August 2009.
[8] 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"[9] and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge".
[10] Language Log also has an extensive archive of crash blossoms, for example "Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit".
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.
In contrast, in semantic ambiguity the structure remains the same, but the individual words are interpreted differently.
Consider the following statements: Research supports the reanalysis model as the most likely reason for why interpreting these ambiguous sentences is hard.
In sentences 2 and 3, the reflexive pronouns “himself” and “herself” clarify that “who scratched” is modifying the son and the princess respectively.
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 [23] Children interpret ambiguous sentences differently from adults due to lack of experience.
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.
[26] 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.