ambiguous
part of speech
adjective (ambiguous, more ambiguous, most ambiguous)
meaning for a pupil
1) Ambiguous means having more than one possible meaning, so it is unclear which one is meant. tree →
2) Ambiguous can mean uncertain or not clearly decided. tree →
sense in the lessons
In English lessons ambiguous sentences are a classic puzzle: «I saw the man with the telescope» (who had the telescope?). Clear writing avoids ambiguity with careful word order and commas. In maths, a question is ambiguous if it can be read in two ways, so mathematicians use brackets. Phrases: an ambiguous sentence, an ambiguous answer, ambiguous ending.
examples
- «Let's eat, Grandma» and «Let's eat Grandma» show how a comma removes ambiguous meaning. tree →
- The sign «Slow children» is ambiguous! tree →
- Her answer was ambiguous: I couldn't tell if it was yes or no. tree →
- The story has an ambiguous ending, so readers argue about what happened. tree →
- Is 6 − 2 + 1 ambiguous? Brackets make it clear. tree →
- «I saw her duck» is ambiguous: a bird or a movement? tree →
- The rules of the game were ambiguous, so we argued. tree →
- Interpreting this ambiguous reply to signify the third summer, Hyllus controlled his impatience for three years, when, having collected a powerful army, he once more entered the Peloponnesus. tree →
note
Noun: ambiguity (plural ambiguities). Pronounced am-BIG-yoo-us. Do not confuse with «ambivalent» (having mixed feelings). In maths, 2 + 3 × 4 is NOT ambiguous because of the order of operations: it is 14.
In the corpora
- The antecedent is the noun a pronoun points back to; a pronoun is ambiguous when it could point to more than one person.
- "I saw a man on a hill with a telescope" is ambiguous: the telescope could be yours or the man's.
Trees and pragmatics
Every meaning and example of «ambiguous» parsed by Mova, each sentence with its dependency tree and frames.