Syntactic ambiguity

Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure.

Syntactic ambiguity does not come from the range of meanings of single words, but from the relationship between the words and clauses of a sentence, and the sentence structure hidden behind the word order. In other words, a sentence is syntactically ambiguous when a reader or listener can reasonably interpret one sentence as having multiple possible structures.

In law cases, courts may be asked to interpret the meaning of such ambiguities in laws or contracts. In some instances, arguments claiming highly unlikely interpretations have been called frivolous. A set of possible parse trees for an ambiguous sentence is called a parse forest. The process of resolving syntactic ambiguity is called syntactic disambiguation.