linguistics Linguistics is the scientific study of language. The areas of linguistic analysis are syntax (rules governing the structure of sentences), semantics (meaning), Morphology (linguistics), morphology (structure of words), phonetics (speech sounds ...

, an expression is semantically ambiguous when it can have multiple meanings. The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. Like other kinds of

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning (linguistics), meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several interpretations; others describe it as a concept or statement that has no real reference. A com ...

, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. The language itself is sometimes a contributing factor in the overall effect of semantic ambiguity, in the sense that the level of ambiguity in the context can change depending on whether or not a language boundary is crossed. '' Lexical ambiguity'' is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a

word A word is a basic element of language that carries semantics, meaning, can be used on its own, and is uninterruptible. Despite the fact that language speakers often have an intuitive grasp of what a word is, there is no consensus among linguist ...

morpheme A morpheme is any of the smallest meaningful constituents within a linguistic expression and particularly within a word. Many words are themselves standalone morphemes, while other words contain multiple morphemes; in linguistic terminology, this ...

is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called ''

polysemy Polysemy ( or ; ) is the capacity for a Sign (semiotics), sign (e.g. a symbol, morpheme, word, or phrase) to have multiple related meanings. For example, a word can have several word senses. Polysemy is distinct from ''monosemy'', where a word h ...

''. For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the

foot The foot (: feet) is an anatomical structure found in many vertebrates. It is the terminal portion of a limb which bears weight and allows locomotion. In many animals with feet, the foot is an organ at the terminal part of the leg made up o ...

of a person or the foot of a pot. When an ambiguity instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called ''

homonymy In linguistics, homonyms are words which are either; ''homographs''—words that mean different things, but have the same spelling (regardless of pronunciation), or ''homophones''—words that mean different things, but have the same pronunciatio ...

''. For instance, the English word "row" can denote the action of rowing or to an arrangement of objects. In practice, polysemy and homonymy can be difficult to distinguish. Phrases and sentences can also be semantically ambiguous, particularly when there are multiple ways of semantically combining its subparts. For instance, the English sentence "Everybody isn't here" is ambiguous between an interpretation where not everybody is here and another interpretation where nobody is. This ambiguity is an example of scope ambiguity, a phenomenon widely studied in formal semantics. De re/de dicto ambiguity is another notable example of sentence-level ambiguity which has received much attention in linguistics and philosophy. In some analyses, such ambiguities are the semantic reflexes of syntactic ambiguities, though in other approaches they are not. The meaning of a semantically ambiguous sentence is not necessarily equivalent to the logical disjunction of all of its possible meanings.Poesio, Massimo
"Semantic Ambiguity and Perceived Ambiguity."
/ref>

Notes

{{Formal semantics

Lexical semantics Syntax Generative syntax Grammar