Ambiguity

There is much more potential ambiguity in natural language sentences than one might think.

Lexical Ambiguity: A word can have multiple parts of speech and multiple meanings for each part of speech.

You can verb anything. -- William Safire.
The number of combinations of meanings is the product of the number of meanings for each word.

Syntactic Ambiguity: Phrases might be attached to different parts of the sentence. Especially troublesome are prepositional phrase attachment and conjunctions.

I saw the man on the hill with a telescope.

Lowering the level of the lake allows city officials to kill weeds and residents to repair their docks.

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