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Ambiguity Examples and Worksheets

Ambiguity means when a term, statement, or resolution is not clearly defined, leaving room for several reasonable interpretations.

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Ambiguity means when a term, statement, or resolution is not clearly defined, leaving room for several reasonable interpretations. Uncertainty is a typical characteristic of ambiguity. Consequently, it is a characteristic of any thought or statement whose intended meaning cannot be conclusively determined by a rule or method with infinite stages. The concept of ambiguity is typically compared with that of vagueness. In ambiguity, particular and unique interpretations are allowed (although some may not be immediately clear). Still, incomplete information makes it impossible to create any understanding at the appropriate degree of detail. 

See the fact file below for more information about Ambiguity, or download the comprehensive worksheet pack, which contains worksheets and can be used in the classroom or homeschooling environment.

Key Facts & Information

Linguistic forms

  • Semantic ambiguity is in contrast to lexical ambiguity. The former offers a selection from many well-known and significant context-dependent interpretations.
  • The latter offers an option between several interpretations, none of which may have a universally accepted meaning.
  • This kind of ambiguity and vagueness are closely connected. Because the interpretation of written documents and spoken agreements is sometimes of utmost significance, linguistic ambiguity can be an issue in the legal system.

Lexical Ambiguity

  •  A word or phrase’s lexical ambiguity has to do with the fact that it has multiple meanings in the language to which it belongs. Here, “meaning” refers to everything that a decent dictionary should be able to define.
  • For instance, the lexical definitions of the term “bank” include “financial institution” and “edge of a river.” Or think about “apothecary.” “I purchased herbs at the pharmacy,” one may remark; this might imply that the individual spoke with the pharmacist or visited the apothecary (pharmacy).
  • It is frequently clear which interpretation is meant by an ambiguous term based on the context in which it is used. Most people would not assume someone dug in the mud with a shovel if someone said, “I buried $100 in the bank,” for example. Some linguistic settings may need to offer more details to distinguish a term from its other uses.
  • Lexical ambiguity can be resolved using computational approaches that automatically connect the correct meaning with a word in context, a procedure known as word-sense disambiguation. The usage of multi-defined terms necessitates the author or speaker clarifying their context and, on occasion, expanding on their precise actual meaning. 
  • Evident, concise communication avoids misunderstandings between the sender and the intended recipient. A possible exception to this rule may be a politician who uses “weasel words” and obfuscation to win over supporters from various constituencies who have competing, mutually contradictory goals for their preferred candidate. Ambiguity is an effective political science tactic; words express closely related topics more problematically.

Semantic Ambiguity 

  • When a word, phrase, or sentence has many meanings when taken out of context, this is known as semantic ambiguity.
  • The phrase “her duck” in “We observed her duck” (sample courtesy of Richard Nordquist) might refer to either the person’s bird, the noun “duck,” altered by the possessive pronoun “her,” or to a move she performed. 

Syntactic Ambiguity 

  • Syntactic ambiguity occurs when a sentence‘s structure—its syntax—allows for two (or more) alternative interpretations. It is frequently owing to an ambiguous modifying term, such as a prepositional phrase.
  • “He ate the cookies on the sofa,” for example, might imply that he ate the cookies on the couch (rather than the ones on the table), or it could suggest that he ate the cookies while sitting on the couch.    
  • “You will need an admission charge of $10 or your voucher plus your driver’s license to get in.” It might suggest that you need EITHER ten bucks OR BOTH your voucher and your license. Or it might imply that you must have your license and either ten bucks or a coupon.
  • Revising the statement or using proper punctuation may only resolve syntactic ambiguity; syntactic ambiguity in artificial, formal languages: concepts and theoretical findings (such as computer programming languages).
  • In most cases, semantic and grammatical uncertainty coexist. Syntactically, the statement “We watched her duck” is likewise confusing. An idea such as “He ate the cookies on the sofa” is again semantically disjointed.
  • Different parsings of a syntactically ambiguous sentence seldom, but occasionally, result in the same meaning. The order “Cook, cook!”, for example, can be read as “Cook (noun employed as vocative), cook (imperative verb form)!” but also as “Cook (imperative verb form), cook (noun employed as vocative)!”
  • It is more typical for a syntactically unambiguous phrase to contain a semantic ambiguity; for instance, the verbal ambiguity in “Your boss is a funny dude” is purely semantic, resulting in the response “Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?” Spoken language can comprise many more types of ambiguities, known as phonological ambiguities, which occur when there is more than one way to contain a set of sounds into words.
  • For instance, “ice cream” and “I scream.” In most cases, such uncertainty is overcome by the context. A mondegreen is a mishearing caused by poorly resolved ambiguity.

Philosophy

  • Philosophers (and other logic users) spend a lot of time and effort looking for and removing (or purposely increasing) ambiguity in arguments since it may lead to inaccurate conclusions and be used to cover up faulty ideas.
  • In continental philosophy (especially phenomenology and existentialism), ambiguity is often tolerated as an intrinsic component of the human experience. Martin Heidegger maintained that the relationship between subject and object, mind and body, and part and total, is unclear.
  • Dasein is constantly in a meaningful world in Heidegger’s phenomenology, yet there is always an underlying foundation for every occurrence of signification. Thus, while certain things are definite, they have nothing to do with Dasein’s concern and existential fear, for example, in the face of death. Jean-Paul Sartre follows Heidegger in identifying the human essence as ambiguous, or essentially related to such ambiguity, in his work Being and Nothingness, which he calls an “essay in phenomenological ontology.”
  • Simone de Beauvoir attempts to base ethics on Heidegger’s and Sartre’s writings which is The Ethics of Ambiguity, where she emphasizes the need to wrestle with ambiguity: “as long as there have been scholars and they have assumed, most of them have tried to conceal it, and the ethics which they have suggested to their disciples have always sought the same goal. It has been a matter of removing ambiguity by making oneself purified inwardness or pure externality.
  • Ethics cannot be founded on the authoritative certainty provided by mathematics and logic, nor can it be imposed directly from scientific results. “Since we cannot avoid it, let us attempt to confront it; let us try to accept our essential ambiguity; it is in the understanding of the true conditions of our existence that we must draw our power to live and our motivation for doing,” it says.
  • According to some continental thinkers, notions like life, nature, and sex are equivocal. Corey Anton has suggested that we must find out what is distinct from or united with another: language, he claims, divides what is not, in reality, unique.
  • According to Ernest Becker, the ambition to ‘authoritatively disambiguate’ the universe and existence has resulted in countless ideologies and historical catastrophes such as genocide. On this premise, he contends that rather than pursuing a priori validation or assurance, ethics should focus on ‘dialectically combining opposites’ and balancing tension. Like existentialists and phenomenologists, he sees life’s uncertainty as the source of creativity.

Literature and Rhetoric

  • Ambiguity may be a valuable weapon in writing and rhetoric. For example, Groucho Marx’s famous joke is predicated on a grammatical ambiguity: “Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas; how he went in my pajamas, I’ll never know.”
  • Songs and poetry may utilize ambiguous phrases for artistic impacts, such as “Don’t It Make My Brown Eyes Blue,” wherein “blue” might allude to the hue or grief. Ambiguity can be established in the story in numerous ways: motivation, plot, and character. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter form of ambiguity effectively in his work The Great Gatsby.

Mathematical Notation

  • Mathematical notation, commonly employed in physics and other fields, eliminates numerous ambiguities compared to natural language representation. However, significant lexical, syntactic, and semantic difficulties exist for various reasons.

Constructed Language

  • Some languages were designed to eliminate ambiguity, mainly lexical ambiguity. Lojban and Loglan are similar languages constructed for this purpose, focusing on syntactic ambiguity.
  • Can speak the languages as well as written. These languages are designed to give better technical accuracy than major natural languages, while such attempts at language enhancement have historically been condemned.
  • Languages derived from many origins include a great deal of ambiguity and inconsistency. The numerous exceptions to syntactic and semantic norms take time and are difficult to understand.

Biology

  • Ambiguity has been identified as a concern in structural biology while investigating protein conformations. The three-dimensional structure of a protein is examined by splitting the macromolecule into components known as domains.
  • The complexity of this endeavor stems from the fact that alternative definitions of what a domain is (e.g., folding autonomy, function, thermodynamic stability, or domain movements) might be utilized, resulting in diverse—yet equally valid—domain designations for an identical protein.

Christianity and Judaism

  • The terms “paradox” and “ambiguity” are used interchangeably in Christianity and Judaism. Many Christians and Jews agree with Rudolf Otto’s definition of the holy as mysterium tremendum et fascinans,’ the wondrous mystery that attracts humanity.
  • The apocryphal Book of Judith is notable for the “ingenious ambiguity” expressed by its heroine, for example, when she tells the story’s villain, Holofernes, “my lord will not fail to attain his aims.”
  • G. The orthodox Catholic author G. K. Chesterton frequently used paradox to draw out meanings in popular conceptions that he considered unclear or to expose significance in common words that were often disregarded or forgotten: the title of one of his most notable works, Orthodoxy (1908), itself exploited such a contradiction.

Music

  • In music, ambiguous pieces or parts defy expectations. They may be interpreted in several ways simultaneously, such as some polytonality, polymeter, other vague meters or rhythms, and ambiguous phrasing (Stein 2005, p. 79) in any music component.
  • African music sometimes needs to be more precise. “Theorists are likely to vex themselves with useless efforts to remove doubt exactly when it has a great artistic value,” writes Sir Donald Francis Tovey (1935, p. 195).

Visual Art

  • Specific images in visual art, such as the Necker cube, are aesthetically ambiguous and can be read in two ways. Perceptions of such things stay stable for some time before flipping, a phenomenon known as multistable perception. Impossible things are the polar opposite of such confusing visuals.
  • Pictures or pictures may sometimes be semantically ambiguous: the visual image is clear, but the meaning and story are: is a given facial expression one of enthusiasm or dread, for example?

Social Psychology and Bystander

  • In social psychology, ambiguity is a component that influences people’s reactions to certain situations. In an emergency, high degrees of ambiguity (e.g., an unconscious guy lying on a park bench) makes bystanders less inclined to give aid for fear of misinterpreting the situation and acting needlessly.
  • Alternatively, non-ambiguous crises (e.g., a wounded person begging for aid verbally) elicit more consistent involvement and support. Concerning the bystander effect, research has shown that ambiguous circumstances cause the typical bystander effect (in which more witnesses reduce the chance of any of them intervening) significantly more than non-ambiguous emergencies.

Computer Science

  • The SI prefixes kilo-, mega-, and giga- have historically been used in computer science to signify either the first three points of 1024 (1024, 10242, and 10243), in opposition to the metric system, in which these numbers expressly mean one thousand, one million, and one billion.
  • It is widespread when electronic memory devices (e.g., DRAM) are addressed directly by a binary machine register, and a decimal interpretation makes little practical sense.
  • Following that, the Ki, Mi, and Gi prefixes were introduced to allow binary prefixes to be written explicitly, as well as making k, M, and G unambiguous in texts blending to the new standard—this created further ambiguity in engineering documents lack adequate outward trace of the binary prefixes (essentially indicating the unique style) as to whether the use of k, M and G stays ambiguous (old style) or not (new style).
  • The engineering value 1.0e6 is less uncertain than 1 M ( in which M is ambiguously 1,000,000 or 1,048,576), defined to designate the interval 950,000 to 1,050,000. As the size of non-volatile storage devices exceeds 1 GB (where uncertainty affects the second significant figure consistently), GB and TB nearly invariably represent 109 and 1012 bytes, respectively.

Ambiguity Worksheets

This fantastic bundle contains 5 ready-to-use ambiguity worksheets that are perfect to test student knowledge and understanding of what ambiguity is and how it can be used. You can use these ambiguity worksheets in the classroom with students or with home-schooled children as well.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is ambiguity?

Ambiguity means when a term, statement, or resolution is not clearly defined, leaving room for several reasonable interpretations.

What is meant by lexical ambiguity?

A word or phrase’s lexical ambiguity has to do with the fact that it has multiple meanings in the language to which it belongs.

How does syntactic ambiguity occur?

Syntactic ambiguity occurs when a sentence’s structure—its syntax—allows for two (or more) alternative interpretations. It is frequently owing to an ambiguous modifying term, such as a prepositional phrase.

Is lexical ambiguity the same as semantic ambiguity?

Semantic ambiguity is in contrast to lexical ambiguity. The former offers a selection from many well-known and significant context-dependent interpretations.The latter offers an option between several interpretations, none of which may have a universally accepted meaning.

What is ambiguity in philosophy?

Philosophers (and other logic users) spend a lot of time and effort looking for and removing (or purposely increasing) ambiguity in arguments since it may lead to inaccurate conclusions and be used to cover up faulty ideas.

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Use With Any Curriculum

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