1077: Ambiguity Nov 20, 2017

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Humor relies a great deal on misconceptions based upon ambiguity. Syntactic ambiguity has been discussed here before, when a word can be more than one part of speech, but there is also structural ambiguity, such as in the sentence "I saw the girl with glasses" (i.e. it is not clear who has glasses). Also, there is lexical ambiguity, when a word has two possible meanings such the answer to "in what state will this water be flowing?" could be 'liquid' or, say, 'Kentucky'. Then finally there is referential ambiguity, such as the old joke "where was the Declaration of Independence signed?": "at the bottom". There is of course a great deal of similarity sometimes with these.

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