# 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. | |-|-| | | wikipedia:: [Syntactic ambiguity](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity) | > [!summary]- Wikipedia Synopsis > **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. [[Semantic ambiguity]]