Semantics Ambiguity There are many different aspects of semantics, which are all very interesting.

Just think how many ways that words, phrases and sentences acquire its meaning. Some words have actual entities to which they refer, such as chair. This word refers to a collective idea of all the chairs in existence. Other words have less exact meaning and may vary within the minds of speakers, such as love. This word can mean many things, depends on the context in which one is speaking.

Language has always had its ambiguous tendencies and probably always will. Certain expressions that speakers of a language use can be found very confusing in some cases. Some of the elements which cause misunderstanding and ambiguity are lexical aspects of a word, syntactic structure of a group of words and lack of sufficient contextual information. On other hand, a semantic ambiguity always occurs when a word in a sentence can have two meaning. For example, "He is going to buy a blazer. The word blazer itself has multiple meanings which at first people will thought it is some kind of attire but in second thought people would say it is an automobile.

However, native speakers of a language can usually pick up on the correct interpretation immediately. Being equipped with contextual information is one of the ways of interpreting a sentence or phrase. For example, the sentence, Anne was picking Cloe's hair off the couch all morning. The context in which the sentence is found would be most helpful. Without it the sentence does not make much sense. Now if we knew that Cloe is a Persian cat with long white hair and the couch was made of a course black material, the sentence makes much more sense. One may even create a mental picture that could further the understanding of the sentence which

a big, fluffy black couch was covered in long, white cat hair, and it took Anne all morning to pick it off.

The factors which cause misunderstanding and ambiguity There are many elements which cause misunderstanding and ambiguous in such sentence. Firstly, lexical aspect of a word which means that in a sentence there is a word that has more than one meaning which it is depends on the context or situation that used by a speaker. As example, he saw her duck. The word saw could be interpreted in various meanings which the first meaning indicates saw is an action to look at something in a past tense form, while the second interpretation of a word saw is also an action where someone is cutting something. In sort, every people have their own interpretation based on their understanding or knowledge of certain words.

Secondly, an ambiguous also deals with syntactic structure of a group of word. It means that certain words have many roles or different part of speech in some sentence. For example, the word wave could be a noun or in the same time it could be a verb which its depend on situation. In instance, the wave is very high and she waved at me.

Lastly, lack of sufficient contextual information could also be the factor which some sentence have the presence of ambiguity. As example, some people might lack of vocabularies where they have to refer to the contextual cues in some sentences in a passage or else they will accidently interpret the wrong meaning of a word, phrase or sentence, such as, she is brilliant where some people might not know the word brilliant. Therefore, they must put additional information like she is brilliant that why she got straight As in her final examination. Thus, the reader could assume that the word brilliant is similar with the word excellent.

The example of an ambiguity in a tree structure

1. The boy saw the man with the telescope. Structural Ambiguity (1):

NP Det N

Aux V Det

VP NP N P Det PP NP N Telescope

The

boy

past

saw

the

man

with

the

The tree structure above shows the first interpretation based on the sentence. It describes that the boy is looking at the man using a telescope. It is also called surface structure or surface meaning of a sentence. The colored line shows that it is the first interpretation of ambiguous sentence.

Structural Ambiguity (2):

The second interpretation of tree structure above shows that the boy saw the man holding a telescope. Based on the two colored line, it indicates that it is the second structure or deep meaning of a sentence.