Ambiguities

Science often deals with complex ideas. A good science writer makes these complex ideas
clear and comprehensible. A poet often has the creative license to change details, alter the
convention of language, grammar and syntax, and add ambiguity to his work. A science
writer lacks such freedom.

Science writers communicate scientific facts. If the facts do not come through clearly in a
statement, the purpose of science communication is lost. Scientists write to communicate, not
to impress. Their writing, therefore, must be clear. An ambiguous statement is one that is
unclear because it can be understood in multiple ways.

Here, we attempt to identify some ambiguous sentences and misused words and phrases that
may confuse the reader. Science teachers, thesis guides, and journal peer reviewers and
editors may use their positions to improve scientific writing by diminishing the use of such
words, phrases, and sentences.

Examples:
The doctor treated the patients taking painkillers.
Ambiguity: Were the patients taking painkillers? Did the doctor take painkillers when treating
the patients?

The second study was larger than the first study. It enrolled 1500 patients.
Ambiguity: Does ‘it’ refer to the first study or the second study?

He promoted the quitting of smoking vigorously.

Ambiguity: What was vigorous – the promotion, the quitting or the smoking?

In science writing, each sentence should be clear and must have only one meaning – the one
that the writer intends to convey. Always review and revise your write-up to avoid any
ambiguity.
An ambiguous sentence is a sentence that a reader can interpret in two or more ways.
Ambiguity has at least two common sources -- word order and word meaning.
A. WORD ORDER
The position of words in a sentence is the principal means of showing their relationship. You
should group together words that are related in thought and separate words that are not
related. The following conventions address the most common word order problems.
l. Avoid misplaced modifiers.
The careless placement of a modifier may result in the same sentence having several
meanings.

DON'T SAY: John saw Jane driving down the street.

SAY: John, while driving down the street, saw Jane.

unless you mean

John saw Jane, who was driving down the street.

2. Avoid indefinite pronouns used as references.
If a pronoun could refer to more than one person or object in a sentence, repeat the name of
the individual or object.

DON'T SAY: After the administrator appoints an Assistant, he or she shall supervise the...

SAY: After the Administrator appoints an Assistant, the Assistant shall supervise the...
3. Avoid grouping together two or more prepositional phrases.
A common example of a problem of word order occurs when two or more prepositional
phrases are grouped together in a sentence.

DON'T SAY: Each subscriber to a newspaper in Washington, DC.

SAY: Each newspaper subscriber who lives in Washington, DC.

unless you mean

Each subscriber to a newspaper published in Washington, DC.
B. WORD MEANING
Problems of word meaning occur when one word or phrase is open to several possible
interpretations. The following conventions address the most common problems of word
meaning.
1. Use the singular noun rather than the plural noun.
To the extent your meaning allows, use a singular noun instead of a plural noun. You will
avoid the problem of whether the rule applies separately to each member of a class or jointly
to the class as a whole.

DON'T SAY SAY

The guard shall issue a security badge to each

employee who works in Building D and each
employee who works in Building E.
The guard shall issue security
badges to employees who work in
unless you mean
Building D and Building E.
The guard shall issue a security badge to each
employee who works in both Building D and
Building E. (There are other possible meanings).

2. Draft an expression of time as accurately as possible.

You can eliminate uncertainty as to when a time period begins or ends by clearly stating the
first and last days of that period.

DON'T SAY: From July 1, 19___, until June 30, 19___.

SAY: After June 30, 19___, and before July 1, 19___.

If a time period is measured in whole days, use the word "day" instead of "time". A reader
may interpret the word "time" to mean an exact time during the day or night an event occurs.

DON'T SAY: Thirty days after the time when...

SAY: Thirty days after the day on which....

Avoid the use of time relational words such as "now", "presently", and "currently" in your
regulations. Use of these words to relate a provision in your regulations to the time the
regulations takes effect creates an ambiguity. It is unclear whether the provision in the
regulations should change if the "current" fact changes after the regulation takes effect.

DON'T SAY: The Mayor of the District of Columbia is entitled to a salary equal to that of a
GS-15, step 2, as now prescribed by law.
[You know what the Mayor's salary is on the day the regulation takes effect but what salary
does the Mayor receive if Congress changes the pay rate for a GS-15 one week, one month,
or one year after the regulation takes effect?]

If, in the example above, you intend the provision to remain unchanged after the regulation
takes effect, it is better to determine what the provision would be on the day the regulation
takes effect and write that specific provision into your regulation.

SAY: The Mayor of the District of Columbia is entitled to a salary of $____________.

However, if you intend the provision to change as time passes, make that fact clear.

SAY: The Mayor of the District of Columbia is entitled to a salary equal to that of GS-15,
step 2. The GS-15, step 2, salary is adjusted by Congress.
3. Draft an expression of age as accurately as possible.
Similar problems occur when you express an age requirement. The expression "more than 21
years old" has two possible meanings. A person may be "more than 21" on his or her 21st
birthday, or on his or her 22nd birthday. Depending upon which meaning you intend, clarify
the ambiguity as follows:

DON'T SAY: A person who is more than 21 years old...

SAY: A person who is 21 years old or older...

unless you mean

A person who is 22 years old or older...

DON'T SAY: Between the ages of 16 and 20...

SAY: Sixteen years old or older and under 21...

4. Do not use privisos.
The priviso is archaic, legalistic, and usually results in a long and unintelligible sentence. Use
the following drafting conventions to avoid expressions such as "provided however" and
"provided always".
 To introduce a qualification or limitation to the rule, use "but".
 To introduce an exception to the rule, use "except that".
 To introduce a condition to the rule, use "if".
 If the clause is a separate complete thought, start a new sentence or subsection.
It can be seen that ambiguity is a complex language phenomenon. It means that an
expression is ambiguous and can be interpreted in two or more ways. Yet ambiguity is a
common phenomenon in language communities. Phonetics, grammar, semantics, syntax,
as small as punctuation and intonation can all be the cause of ambiguity. Based on this,
linguists divide ambiguity into different types such as phonetic ambiguity, lexical
ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, and pragmatic ambiguity.

2. Classification of Ambiguity in English Sentences

2.1. Phonetic Ambiguity
Phonetic ambiguity is mainly because in people’s daily life, voice always carries
information in the form of language flow as the main transmission medium. Due to the
lack of visual aids and necessary context of written language and text, ambiguity in
language is unavoidable.
E.g. 1: A classic example of phonetic ambiguity in English is a conversation between a
mouse and a girl named Alice from Lewis Carroll’s book Alice’s Adventures in
wonderland [4] .
“Mine is a long and a sad tale!” said the Mouse, turning to Alice, and sighing.
“It IS a long tail, certainly,” said Alice, looking down with wonder at the Mouse’s tail;
“but why do you call it sad?”
Thus Alice can understand tail can be long, but she wonders why the tail is sad.
In the book Through the Looking Glass from the same author, there are also other
examples of phonetic ambiguity [5] :
E.g. 2: Here the Red Queen began again. “Can you answer useful questions?” she said.
“How is bread made?”
“I know that! “Alice cried eagerly. “You take some flour―”
“Where do you pick the flower?” the White Queen asked. “In a garden, or in the hedges?”
“Well, it isn’t picked at all,” Alice explained: “it’s ground―”
“How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen. “You mustn’t leave out so many
things.”
In this conversation, ambiguity is caused by two pairs words, “flower” and “flour”, the
verb “ground” (p.p. form of the verb grind,) which means to crash sth. to very small
pieces, and the noun “ground” (a piece of land). The two words in each pair has no
semantic relation at all, however, the same pronunciation connects them together. Thus, a
contrast of meanings occurs. The White Queen doesn’t mean to be humorous, but she
unintentionally asked in a humorous manner.
2.2. Lexical Ambiguity
One of the biggest characteristics of natural language is the complex relationship between
language form and language meaning. For the needs of scientific research, the
relationship between the signifier and the signified of the sign is one-to-one for the
various artificial languages designed by people. In natural languages, one signifier often
corresponds to multiple referents, resulting in ambiguity in vocabulary.
As a symbol of communication, each word of language must correspond to a certain
function or meaning. However, due to the finiteness of English symbols and the infinite
nature of things, the language cannot perform its communicative functions smoothly
when the symbol is the only one. In this way, polysemy, which means a word has multiple
meanings, appears, and has a tendency to expand. This is the result of people constantly
giving words new meanings in the long-term development of the language. When two or
more different meanings of a polysemous word are both valid in the same sentence,
resulting in the non-unique referent, ambiguity arises.
E.g. 3: Hugo is drawing a cart.
Here two interpretations can be implied from this sentence because the word “draw” can
have two different meanings as the predicate in the sentence. So it can be paraphrased as
below:
a. Hugo is drawing a picture of a cart.
b. Hugo is pulling a cart.
E.g. 4: They can fish.
The two meanings of this ambiguous sentence are “they can fish” and “they canned fish.”
“Can” is a homophone. In the first semantic expression, “can” is an auxiliary verb and
“fish” is a verb; in the second semantic expression, “can” is a verb and “fish” is a noun.
To avoid ambiguity, modal verbs can be added before “can”, or general past tense suffixes
can be added at the end of words, and “the” can be used before “fish” to define the part of
speech of “can” and the noun of “fish” respectively, such as “They will can the fish.” or
“They canned the fish”; You can also add an adverbial after the verb to limit the part of
speech of the auxiliary verb of “can” and the part of verb of “fish”, such as: “They can
fish in the pond.”
2.3. Pragmatic Ambiguity
The above types of ambiguity are caused by language structure. But sometimes ambiguity
can be eliminated in proper context. Therefore, in spite of the form of structure, language
inevitably has a very important level, which is pragmatic.
Charles H. Morris first defined pragmatics with the intention of distinguishing pragmatics
from syntax and semantics in his work Foundations of the Theory of signs. As Geoffrey
Leech stated in 1974, pragmatics is the study of how utterances have different meanings
in different situations [6] . On account of this, people usually relate pragmatics to
ambiguity. Pragmatics deals with specific utterances in specific contexts, with particular
emphasis on the ways in which different social contexts influence language interpretation.
In other words, pragmatics is concerned with the way language is used to communicate,
not the way it is composed. It puts the language structure in a certain context for research,
that is, a word or sentence has different meanings in different contexts. In the process of
language application, as the context changes, a language form will show multiple
meanings, which is called pragmatic ambiguity.
Thomas describes the process of interpreting as several levels under the heading of
pragmatics: The first level is that of abstract meaning; we move from abstract meaning to
contextual meaning (also called utterance meaning) by assigning meaning and/or
reference to a word, phrase or sentence. The third level of meaning is reached when we
consider the speaker’s intention, known as the force of an utterance. Ambiguity might
appear at each level of the interpreting process [7] .
E.g. 5: Mr. Smith telephoned his father that he did not know the truth.
Without any hint, the pronoun “he” refers to unknown, or “Mr. Smith” or “his father”,
then this sentence can only be translated as:
a. Mr. Smith called his father and said that he is not himself Understand the truth.
b. Mr. Smith called his father and said that his father did not understand the truth.
2.4. Syntactic Ambiguity
From the syntactic point of view, Lyons gives a definition that, any sentence (according to
generative grammar) which can make more than one parsing is ambiguous [8] . Syntactic
ambiguity means that the structure of a sentence can be analyzed differently, that is, the
components of the sentence have different ways of combinations, which results in
ambiguity. Therefore, syntactic ambiguity is also called structural ambiguity. Compared
with other types of ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity appears more frequently in ordinary
English, and is more complicated than other types of ambiguity.
The ambiguity that arises because people have different understandings of the syntactic
structure in a sentence is called syntactic ambiguity. At the syntactic level, the study of
ambiguity is mainly based on the theoretical basis of transformational generative
grammar. According to the transformational generative grammar theory, each sentence
has a surface structure and a deep structure. The surface structure refers to the relationship
between the various components of the sentence that is actually formed, and the linear
arrangement of these components results in the sentence. The deep structure describes the
grammatical relationships that are the basis of the surface structure, and these
grammatical relationships cannot be directly seen from the surface structure. Therefore, if
a surface structure has more than two sentences with deep structures at the same time,
ambiguity occurs. Hirst proposed a kind of “attachment theory” by observing a large
number of ambiguous sentences. His theory believes that ambiguity is caused by the
uncertain attachment relationship between a certain component and other components in
the surface structure [9] .
2.4.1. Ambiguity Caused by Adjective Phrases
E.g. 6: There stood a big brick house at the foot of the hill.
“Big” is an adjective and is used as an attributive in a sentence. It can be regarded as
modifying the noun phrase “brick house”, or it can be regarded as directly modifying
“house”. Therefore, this sentence is ambiguous.
2.4.2. Ambiguity Caused by Adverbial Phrases
E.g. 7: The General Manager promised a bonus for each employee later.
There is a time adverbial “later” in the sentence. Because it is placed at the end of the
sentence, the sentence is ambiguous. This sentence can be translated as “the general
manager promises to the bonus will be later given every employee”, and it can also be
translated as “Later the general manager promises to give every employee a bonus”.
2.4.3. Ambiguity Caused by Comparative Sentences
In English, comparative adverbial clauses often take the form of omission, which can
easily lead to ambiguity.
E.g. 8: I love Mary than Lucy.
This sentence is an ambiguous sentence. There are two explanations. The first is “I love
Mary better than Lucy does. (=than Lucy loves Mary)”; the second is “I love Mary better
than I love Lucy.” (I love Mary more than loving Lucy).
2.4.4. Ambiguity Caused by the Same Verb Forms
English verbs have three basic inflection forms, namely the past tense, the past participle
and the present participle. The past tense and past participle of most verbs are formed by
adding -ed after the original form of the verb, and the present participle is formed by
adding -ing after the original form of the verb, and gerunds are also formed by adding -
ing after the original form of the verb. Some current participles are converted into
adjectives, but still retain the original spelling form; some past participles are also
retained as the original spelling form when they are used as adjectives. The variations of
the above verbs and their syntactic function conversion often cause ambiguity.
E.g. 9: Flying planes can be dangerous.
“Flying” can be interpreted as a gerund and present participle. When “flying” is the
present participle, it is used as a form word to modify the nouns “planes” and “flying”.
When used as a gerund, it is used in conjunction with “planes” to form a verb phrase and
act as a subject in the sentence. Therefore, there are two translations of this sentence: “An
airplane in flight may be dangerous” and “Flying an airplane may be dangerous.”
 2.4.5. Ambiguity Caused by Parallel Parts
Two parallel sentence components are usually connected by parallel conjunctions, such as
and. Sometimes there is a modifier before or after the parallel structure, which can easily
cause ambiguity.
E.g. 10: Mr. Stone was a professor and a dramatist of great fame.
The syntactic relationship between the parallel structure “a professor and a dramatist” and
the attributive “of great fame” makes this sentence ambiguous. Because the attributive “of
great fame” can be understood as modifying only “dramatist”, but also as modifying
“dramatist” and “professor” at the same time.
2.4.6. Ambiguity Caused by the Unclear Negative Center
The negative form of English sentences is often composed of “auxiliary verb + negative
word (not/n’t)”. This kind of negative sentence can negate a specific component in the
sentence, or it can negate the whole sentence. In negative sentences, “negative scope” and
“negative center” are two worthy research objects. The so-called negative range is the
main item of negative judgment. The negation center is the bearer of the negation
meaning. Different understandings of the scope of negation or the center of negation often
lead to ambiguity.
E.g. 11: I don’t teach because it is easy.
Looking at this sentence in isolation, the following two explanations are acceptable:
a. Because English is easy, I don’t want to teach English.
b. I teach English not because English is easy.
Ambiguity means “multiple meaning.” A word or passage that can be understood or
interpreted in more than one way is ambiguous. For example: You see, many hands
make light work.

*Note: This sentence is ambiguous because of the words “light” and “work.” It is
unclear whether light is a noun or adjective, and whether work is a noun or verb. So,
readers are left to wonder whether the “light is working,” or the “work is light.”

STAGEBERG’S 7 STRATEGIES:
1. SYNONYMY:
Find a clear synonym to replace the ambiguous word.
 The doctor made them well. ---> The doctor made them skillfully
2. EXPANSION:
Adding a word or two to the sentence can remove ambiguity.
 He finished the race last Thursday. ---> He finished the race on last Thursday.
3. REARRANGEMENT:
Use the same elements in a different order. Rearrangement usually involves two nouns
and an adjective. The sentence is ambiguous because the adjective could modify one or
both of the nouns.
 They are chewing tobacco and garlic.
or
 They are chewing garlic and tobacco.
Since it’s already known that chewing applies to tobacco, we are only uncertain as to
whether the garlic is also chewable. So, by listing garlic first we identify that the
“chewing” modifies both nouns. Otherwise, we can group the adjective, “chewing” with
the noun “tobacco” after “garlic,” to clarify that the garlic is not chewable:
 They are eating garlic and chewing tobacco
4. CAPITALIZATION:
Capital letters are sometimes useful to make sentences clear.
 You should call your uncle George. ---> You should call your Uncle George.
The first is ambiguous because it is unclear if the person calling the uncle is named
George or if the uncle’s name is George.
5. PUNCTUATION:
Commas, and other marks of punctuation, can be used to correct written ambiguity.
 foreign study programs ---> foreign-study programs
In the above example, we encounter ambiguity as the result of successive modifiers. For
an in-depth explanation, see the heading “Successive Modifiers” at the end of this
handout.
6. SPELLING:
Words that share the same spelling but different meaning in English are frequently the
source for ambiguity in speech. However, spelling will rarely remove written ambiguity.
 The governor went hunting bear last week.
7. ALTERNATION OF CONTEXT:
In clear writing, the context restricts meaning of words and structures. Therefore,
ambiguity can be remedied by making the context sufficiently restrictive. Include specific
details to narrow the possible meanings of the ambiguous statement.
USE OF GRAMMATICAL SIGNALS:
Gender Signals (his, her, *theirs, its):
 The puppy sat by the girl with the contented look ---> The puppy by the girl with
(her/its) contented look
 *Note: They/Their/Theirs can be used as a gender-neutral singular pronoun. Be sure
to clarify in your writing that this is the case - many readers may only know this
pronoun as a plural option.
Person-thing Signals (who, which):
 The dog of the neighbor that bothered him ---> The dog of the neighbor (who/which)
bothered him
Number Signals (was-singular, were-plural):
 One of the freshman girls who seemed downcast ---> One of the freshman girls who
(was/were) downcast
Coordination Signals:
 A car which stood behind the garage that was in need of paint ---> A car which stood
behind the garage (and) which was in need of paint
SUCCESSIVE MODIFIERS:
When trying to avoid ambiguity in your writing, it is important to keep in mind that
successive modifiers should always be considered an automatic danger signal. Successive
modifiers are more than one adjective before a noun. The more modifiers (adjectives) you
have before a noun, the more chance you have of ambiguity.
 small business man (Is the business small, or the man?)
 old car law (Is the law old, or the car?)
 gray cat’s eye (Is the cat gray, or the cat’s eye?)