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1932 births |
1986 deaths |
20th-century Russian diarists |
20th-century Russian male actors |
20th-century Russian male writers |
20th-century Russian non-fiction writers |
20th-century Russian screenwriters |
Burials at Sainte-Geneviève-des-Bois Russian Cemetery |
Cannes Film Festival Award for Best Director winners |
Deaths from cancer in France |
Deaths from lung cancer |
Directors of Golden Lion winners |
Film directors from Kostroma Oblast |
Filmmakers who won the Best Foreign Language Film BAFTA Award |
Gerasimov Institute of Cinematography alumni |
High Courses for Scriptwriters and Film Directors faculty |
Lenin Prize winners |
Male actors from Ivanovo Oblast |
Male actors from Kostroma Oblast |
People from Kadyysky District |
People's Artists of the RSFSR |
Russian experimental filmmakers |
Russian male film actors |
Russian opera directors |
Russian Orthodox Christians from Russia |
Russian people of Polish descent |
Russian people of Romanian descent |
Science fiction film directors |
Soviet diarists |
Soviet documentary film directors |
Soviet emigrants to France |
Soviet emigrants to Italy |
Soviet film directors |
Soviet male film actors |
Soviet non-fiction writers |
Soviet screenwriters |
Writers from Ivanovo Oblast |
Writers from Kostroma Oblast Ambiguity is a type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved... |
The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness. In ambiguity, specific and distinct interpretations are permitted (although some may not be immediately obvious), whereas with information that is vague, it is difficult to form any interpretation at the desired level of specificity. |
Linguistic forms |
Lexical ambiguity is contrasted with semantic ambiguity. The former represents a choice between a finite number of known and meaningful context-dependent interpretations. The latter represents a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of which may have a standard agreed-upon meaning. This form of am... |
Linguistic ambiguity can be a problem in law, because the interpretation of written documents and oral agreements is often of paramount importance. |
Lexical ambiguity |
The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. "Meaning" here refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary. For instance, the word "bank" has several distinct lexical definitions, including "financial institution" and "edge... |
The context in which an ambiguous word is used often makes it evident which of the meanings is intended. If, for instance, someone says "I buried $100 in the bank", most people would not think someone used a shovel to dig in the mud. However, some linguistic contexts do not provide sufficient information to disambiguat... |
Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as word sense disambiguation. |
The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific intended meaning (in which case, a less ambiguous term should have been used). The goal of clear concise communication is that the receiver(s) have no misunderstanding about what was meant t... |
More problematic are words whose senses express closely related concepts. "Good", for example, can mean "useful" or "functional" (That's a good hammer), "exemplary" (She's a good student), "pleasing" (This is good soup), "moral" (a good person versus the lesson to be learned from a story), "righteous", etc. "I have a g... |
Semantic and syntactic ambiguity |
Semantic ambiguity occurs when a word, phrase or sentence, taken out of context, has more than one interpretation. In "We saw her duck" (example due to Richard Nordquist), the words "her duck" can refer either |
to the person's bird (the noun "duck", modified by the possessive pronoun "her"), or |
to a motion she made (the verb "duck", the subject of which is the objective pronoun "her", object of the verb "saw"). |
Syntactic ambiguity arises when a sentence can have two (or more) different meanings because of the structure of the sentence—its syntax. This is often due to a modifying expression, such as a prepositional phrase, the application of which is unclear. "He ate the cookies on the couch", for example, could mean that he a... |
For the notion of, and theoretic results about, syntactic ambiguity in artificial, formal languages (such as computer programming languages), see Ambiguous grammar. |
Usually, semantic and syntactic ambiguity go hand in hand. The sentence "We saw her duck" is also syntactically ambiguous. Conversely, a sentence like "He ate the cookies on the couch" is also semantically ambiguous. Rarely, but occasionally, the different parsings of a syntactically ambiguous phrase result in the same... |
Spoken language can contain many more types of ambiguities which are called phonological ambiguities, where there is more than one way to compose a set of sounds into words. For example, "ice cream" and "I scream". Such ambiguity is generally resolved according to the context. A mishearing of such, based on incorrectly... |
Metonymy involves referring to one entity by the name of a different but closely related entity (for example, using "wheels" to refer to a car, or "Wall Street" to refer to the stock exchanges located on that street or even the entire US financial sector). In the modern vocabulary of critical semiotics, metonymy encomp... |
Philosophy |
Philosophers (and other users of logic) spend a lot of time and effort searching for and removing (or intentionally adding) ambiguity in arguments because it can lead to incorrect conclusions and can be used to deliberately conceal bad arguments. For example, a politician might say, "I oppose taxes which hinder economi... |
In continental philosophy (particularly phenomenology and existentialism), there is much greater tolerance of ambiguity, as it is generally seen as an integral part of the human condition. Martin Heidegger argued that the relation between the subject and object is ambiguous, as is the relation of mind and body, and par... |
Literature and rhetoric |
In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool. Groucho Marx's classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: "Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know". Songs and poetry often rely on ambiguous words for artistic effect, as in the s... |
In the narrative, ambiguity can be introduced in several ways: motive, plot, character. F. Scott Fitzgerald uses the latter type of ambiguity with notable effect in his novel The Great Gatsby. |
Mathematical notation |
Mathematical notation, widely used in physics and other sciences, avoids many ambiguities compared to expression in natural language. However, for various reasons, several lexical, syntactic and semantic ambiguities remain. |
Names of functions |
The ambiguity in the style of writing a function should not be confused with a multivalued function, which can (and should) be defined in a deterministic and unambiguous way. Several special functions still do not have established notations. Usually, the conversion to another notation requires to scale the argument or ... |
Sinc function |
Elliptic integral of the third kind; translating elliptic integral form MAPLE to Mathematica, one should replace the second argument to its square, see Talk:Elliptic integral#List of notations; dealing with complex values, this may cause problems. |
Exponential integral |
Hermite polynomial |
Expressions |
Ambiguous expressions often appear in physical and mathematical texts. |
It is common practice to omit multiplication signs in mathematical expressions. Also, it is common to give the same name to a variable and a function, for example, . Then, if one sees , there is no way to distinguish whether it means multiplied by , or function evaluated at argument equal to . In each case of use of ... |
Creators of algorithmic languages try to avoid ambiguities. Many algorithmic languages (C++ and Fortran) require the character * as symbol of multiplication. The Wolfram Language used in Mathematica allows the user to omit the multiplication symbol, but requires square brackets to indicate the argument of a function; s... |
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