Syntactic ambiguity
Consequently, a sentence presents as syntactically ambiguous when it permits reasonable derivation of several possible grammatical structures by an observer.Occasionally, claims based on highly improbable interpretations of such ambiguities are dismissed as being frivolous litigation and without merit.Globally ambiguous sentences exist where no feature of the representation (i.e. word order) distinguishes the possible distinct interpretations.The name crash blossoms was proposed for these ambiguous headlines by Danny Bloom in the Testy Copy Editors discussion group in August 2009.[8] The Columbia Journalism Review regularly reprints such headlines in its "The Lower Case" column, and has collected them in the anthologies "Squad Helps Dog Bite Victim"[9] and "Red Tape Holds Up New Bridge".[10] Language Log also has an extensive archive of crash blossoms, for example "Infant Pulled from Wrecked Car Involved in Short Police Pursuit".One enduring joke using an ambiguous modifier is a quip spoken by Groucho Marx in the 1930 film Animal Crackers: "I shot an elephant in my pajamas.Consider the following statements: Research supports the reanalysis model as the most likely reason for why interpreting these ambiguous sentences is hard.A good-enough interpretation may occur when such a representation is not robust, supported by context, or both and must handle potentially distracting information.Thus, such information is clipped for successful understanding [23] Children interpret ambiguous sentences differently from adults due to lack of experience.Furthermore, children appear to be less skilled at directing their attention back to the part of the sentence that is most informative in terms of aiding reanalysis.