(traditional; 1957; 1930) Linguistics/Literary Theory A potential for more than one meaning in an utterance. Ambiguity is usually resolved by context.
Traditional SEMANTICS concentrated on individual words like trunk and bank which are called ‘homonyms’. In TRANSFORMATIONAL-GENERATIVE GRAMMAR, Avram Noam Chomsky (1928–) stipulated that speakers’ INTUITIONS would include recognition of syntactic ambiguity, as in ‘The old men and women boarded the bus’.
In poetry, the English poet and critic William Empson (1906–84) detected several kinds of multiple meaning, or types of ambiguity, used to convey richness, a complicated state of mind, creative contradiction, and so on. His exposition of ambiguity in 1930 was one of the major sources for the ideas of NEW CRITICISM
J G Kooij, Ambiguity in Natural Language (Amsterdam, 1971); W Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (New York, 1966)
RF