Explanation of Ambiguity

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Well good day Ladies and Gentleman and My lovely Readers…came back again on Juliana’s blog. Now let me share you more and more about “Ambiguity” but please watch this video first and enjoy with the Explanation….


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Kent Bach, Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry
AMBIGUITY

A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The word 'light', for example, can mean not very heavy or not very dark. Words like 'light', 'note', 'bear' and 'over' are lexically ambiguous. They induce ambiguity in phrases or sentences in which they occur, such as 'light suit' and 'The duchess can't bear children'. However, phrases and sentences can be ambiguous even if none of their constituents is. The phrase 'porcelain egg container' is structurally ambiguous, as is the sentence 'The police shot the rioters with guns'. Ambiguity can have both a lexical and a structural basis, as with sentences like 'I left her behind for you' and 'He saw her duck'.
The notion of ambiguity has philosophical applications. For example, identifying an ambiguity can aid in solving a philosophical problem. Suppose one wonders how two people can have the same idea, say of a unicorn. This can seem puzzling until one distinguishes 'idea' in the sense of a particular psychological occurrence, a mental representation, from 'idea' in the sense of an abstract, shareable concept. On the other hand, gratuitous claims of ambiguity can make for overly simple solutions. Accordingly, the question arises of how genuine ambiguities can be distinguished from spurious ones. Part of the answer consists in identifying phenomena with which ambiguity may be confused, such as vagueness, unclarity, inexplicitness and indexicality. 
1. Types of ambiguity
2. Ambiguity contrasted
3. Philosophical relevance
Well Ladies and Gentleman now the next explanation start from:
1. Types of ambiguity
Although people are sometimes said to be ambiguous in how they use language, ambiguity is, strictly speaking, a property of linguistic expressions. A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. Obviously this definition does not say what meanings are or what it is for an expression to have one (or more than one). For a particular language, this information is provided by a grammar, which systematically pairs forms with meanings, ambiguous forms with more than one meaning (see MEANING and SEMANTICS).
There are two types of ambiguity, lexical and structural. 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'. There are various tests for ambiguity. One test is having two unrelated antonyms, as with 'hard', which has both 'soft' and 'easy' as opposites. Another is the conjunction reduction test. Consider the sentence, 'The tailor pressed one suit in his shop and one in the municipal court'. Evidence that the word 'suit' (not to mention 'press') is ambiguous is provided by the anomaly of the 'crossed interpretation' of the sentence, on which 'suit' is used to refer to an article of clothing and 'one' to a legal action.
The above examples of ambiguity are each a case of one word with more than one meaning. However, it is not always clear when we have only one word. The verb 'desert' and the noun 'dessert', which sound the same but are spelled differently, count as distinct words (they are homonyms). So do the noun 'bear' and the verb 'bear', even though they not only sound the same but are spelled the same. These examples may be clear cases of homonymy, but what about the noun 'respect' and the verb 'respect' or the preposition 'over' and the adjective 'over'? Are the members of these pairs homonyms or different forms of the same word? There is no general consensus on how to draw the line between cases of one ambiguous word and cases of two homonyous words. Perhaps the difference is ultimately arbitrary.
2. Ambiguity contrasted
It is a platitude that what your words convey 'depends on what you mean'. This suggests that one can mean different things by what one says, but it says nothing about the variety of ways in which this is possible. Semantic ambiguity is one such way, but there are others: homonymy (mentioned above), vagueness, relativity, indexicality, nonliterality, indirection and inexplicitness. All these other phenomena illustrate something distinct from multiplicity of linguistic meaning.
An expression is vague if it admits of borderline cases (see VAGUENESS). Terms like 'bald', 'heavy' and 'old' are obvious examples, and their vagueness is explained by the fact that they apply to items on fuzzy regions of a scale. Terms that express cluster concepts, like 'intelligent', 'athletic' and 'just', are vague because their instances are determined by the application of several criteria, no one of which is decisive.
Relativity is illustrated by the words 'heavy' and 'old' (these are vague as well). Heavy people are lighter than nonheavy elephants, and old cats can are younger than some young people. A different sort of relativity occurs with sentences like 'Jane is finished' and 'John will be late'. Obviously one cannot be finished or late simpliciter but only finished with something or late for something. This does not show that the words 'finished' and 'late' are ambiguous (if they were, they would be ambiguous in as many ways as there are things one can be finished with or things one can be late for), but only that such a sentence is semantically underdeterminate--it must be used to mean more than what the sentence means.
Indexical terms, like 'you', 'here' and 'tomorrow', have fixed meaning but variable reference. For example, the meaning of the word 'tomorrow' does not change from one day to the next, though of course its reference does (see DEMONSTRATIVES AND INDEXICALS).
Nonliterality, indirection and inexplicitness are further ways in which what a speaker means is not uniquely determined by what his words mean (see SPEECH ACTS). They can give rise to unclarity in communication, as might happen with utterances of 'You're the icing on my cake', 'I wish you could sing longer and louder', and 'Nothing is on TV tonight'. These are not cases of linguistic ambiguity but can be confused with it because speakers are often said to be ambiguous.
3. Philosophical relevance
Philosophical distinctions can be obscured by unnoticed ambiguities. So it is important to identify terms that do doubtle duty. For example, there is a kind of ambiguity, often described as the 'act/object' or the 'process/product' ambiguity, exhibited by everyday terms like 'building', 'shot' and 'writing'. Confusions in philosophy of language and mind can result from overlooking this ambiguity in terms like 'inference', 'statement' and 'thought'. Another common philosophical ambiguity is the type/token distinction. Everyday terms like 'animal', 'book' and 'car' apply both to types and to instances (tokens) of those types. The same is true of linguistic terms like 'sentence', 'word' and 'letter' and to philosophically important terms like 'concept', 'event' and 'mental state' (see TYPE/TOKEN DISTINCTION).

SOURCE:
http://online.sfsu.edu/kbach/ambguity.html

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