Editing Ambiguity (section)

=== Semantic and syntactic ambiguity ===
[[File:Comedic Wet Cat Food sign in an ASDA supermarket.jpg|thumb|Which is wet: the food, or the cat?]]
[[Semantic ambiguity]] occurs when a word, phrase or sentence, taken out of context, has more than one interpretation. In "We saw her duck" (example due to Richard Nordquist), the words "her duck" can refer either
# to the person's bird (the noun "duck", modified by the possessive pronoun "her"), or
# to a motion she made (the verb "duck", the subject of which is the objective pronoun "her", object of the verb "saw").<ref name="ReferenceA" />

[[Syntactic ambiguity]] arises when a sentence can have two (or more) different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due to a modifying expression, such as a prepositional phrase, the application of which is unclear. "He ate the cookies on the couch", for example, could mean that he ate those cookies that were on the couch (as opposed to those that were on the table), or it could mean that he was sitting on the couch when he ate the cookies. "To get in, you will need an entrance fee of $10 or your voucher and your drivers' license." This could mean that you need EITHER ten dollars OR BOTH your voucher and your license. Or it could mean that you need your license AND you need EITHER ten dollars OR a voucher. Only rewriting the sentence, or placing appropriate punctuation can resolve a syntactic ambiguity.<ref name="ReferenceA">Critical Thinking, 10th ed., Ch 3, Moore, Brooke N. and Parker, Richard. McGraw-Hill, 2012</ref>
For the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in artificial, [[formal languages]] (such as computer [[programming language]]s), see [[Ambiguous grammar]].

Usually, semantic and syntactic ambiguity go hand in hand. The sentence "We saw her duck" is also syntactically ambiguous. Conversely, a sentence like "He ate the cookies on the couch" is also semantically ambiguous. Rarely, but occasionally, the different parsings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase result in the same meaning. For example, the command "Cook, cook!" can be parsed as "Cook (noun used as [[vocative expression|vocative]]), cook (imperative verb form)!", but also as "Cook (imperative verb form), cook (noun used as vocative)!". It is more common that a syntactically unambiguous phrase has a semantic ambiguity; for example, the lexical ambiguity in "Your boss is a funny man" is purely semantic, leading to the response "Funny ha-ha or funny peculiar?"

[[Spoken language]] can contain many more types of ambiguities that are called phonological ambiguities, where there is more than one way to compose a set of sounds into words. For example, "ice cream" and "I scream". Such ambiguity is generally resolved according to the context. A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly resolved ambiguity, is called a [[mondegreen]].