Definition:
The presence of two or more possible meanings within a single word. Compare to syntactic ambiguity. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- The Rabbi married my sister.
- She is looking for a match.
- The fisherman went to the bank.
- "[C]ontext is highly relevant to this part of the meaning of utterances. . . . For example
They passed the port at midnight
is lexically ambiguous. However, it would normally be clear in a given context which of the two homonyms, 'port' ('harbor') or 'port' ('kind of fortified wine'), is being used."
--and also which sense of the polysemous verb 'pass' is intended."
(John Lyons, Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. Cambridge Univ. Press, 1995) - "The following example, taken from Johnson-Laird (1983),
illustrates two important characteristics of lexical ambiguity:
The plane banked just before landing, but then the pilot lost control. The strip on the field runs for only the barest of yards and the plane just twisted out of the turn before shooting into the ground.
First, that this passage is not particularly difficult to understand in spite of the fact that all of its content words are ambiguous suggests that ambiguity is unlikely to invoke special resource-demanding processing mechanisms but rather is handled as a by-product of normal comprehension. Second, there are a number of ways in which a word can be ambiguous. The word plane, for example, has several noun meanings, and it can also be used as a verb. The word twisted could be an adjective and is also morphologically ambiguous between the past tense and participial forms of the verb to twist."
(Patrizia Tabossi et al., "Semantic Effects on Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution" in Attention and Performance XV, ed. by C. Umiltà and M. Moscovitch. MIT Press, 1994)
Also Known As: semantic ambiguity
