Language has always had its ambiguous tendencies and probably always will. Certain expressions that speakers of a language use can be found very confusing in some cases. Some of the elements which cause misunderstanding and ambiguity are lexical aspects of a word, syntactic structure of a group of words and lack of sufficient contextual information. Innocent looking sentences can be monsters when it comes to actually interpreting them; some may have an array of different interpretations. However, native speakers of a language can usually pick up on the correct interpretation immediately. Being equipped with contextual information is one of the ways of interpreting a sentence or phrase. For example, the sentence ,Anne was picking Cloe's hair off the couch all morning, the context in which the sentence is found would be most helpful. Without it the sentence does not make much sense. Now if we knew that Cloe is a Persian cat with long white hair and the couch was made of a course black material, the sentence makes much more sense. One may even create a mental picture that could further the understanding of the sentence: a big, fluffy black couch was covered in long, white cat hair, and it took Anne all morning to pick it off.
Lexical Ambiguity
Grammar and how it relates
Back to the elements of semantics
