Semantic ambiguity

A linguistic expression displays semantic ambiguity when it can have multiple senses, at least when uttered out of context. Lexical ambiguity is the subtype of semantic ambiguity which occurs at the level of words or morphemes. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy (e.g. the "foot" of a person versus the "foot" of a pot). When it instead results from two separate words which happen to be pronounced the same way, it is called homonymy. In practice, these types of lexical ambiguity can be difficult to distinguish.[1][2]

Semantic ambiguity can result from a sentence allowing multiple ways of semantically composing its constituent expressions.[3] Scope ambiguity and de re/de dicto ambiguities are two notable examples of this kind of ambiguity. In some frameworks, such ambiguities are the semantic reflexes of syntactic ambiguities, though in other approaches they are not.[4]