AMBIGUITY

AMBIGUITY

 What is Ambiguity?

       Ambiguity or fallacy of ambiguity is a word, phrase, or statement which contains more than one meaning. In this sense, ambiguity has been the source of much frustration, bemusement, and amusement for philosophers, lexicographers, linguists, cognitive scientists, literary theorists and critics, authors, poets, orators and just about everyone who considers the interpretation(s) of linguistic signs.
Ambiguous words or statements lead to vagueness and confusion, and shape the basis for instances of unintentional humor. For instance, it is ambiguous to say “I rode a black horse in red pajamas,” because it may lead us to think the horse was wearing red pajamas. The sentence becomes clear when it is restructured “Wearing red pajamas, I rode a black horse.”

Types of Ambiguity

• Lexical Ambiguity

         Lexical ambiguity is by far the more common. Everyday examples include nouns like 'chip', 'pen' and 'suit', verbs like 'call', 'draw' and 'run', and adjectives like 'deep', 'dry' and 'hard'

• Structural Ambiguity

         Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as the phrases 'Tibetan history teacher', 'a student of high moral principles' and 'short men and women', and the sentences 'The girl hit the boy with a book' and 'Visiting relatives can be boring'

Here are a few things that have been helpful to avoid ambiguity :

• Never use a long word where a short one will do

• Present old information before new information.

• When possible, choose to write in the active voice, instead of the passive voice. Writing in the active voice makes sentences clearer because the reader can easily see who the doer of an action is. That's not to say that you shouldn't use the passive voice at all; it has its own uses (e.g. it can hide the performer of an action), but try to use it sparingly.

• Avoid nominalization (turning verbs into nouns). When possible, use words in their verb form, rather than their noun form.

References
http://literarydevices.net/ambiguity/
http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/ambiguity/#WhatLingAmbiIsnt
https://www.quora.com/How-shall-I-avoid-writing-ambiguous-sentences-Is-there-any-way-to-fix-it
http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/ambguity.html