Vagueness and ambiguity

Ambiguous discourse (upper row) and vague discourse (lower row)

Discourse is said to be ambiguous when it encompasses potentially disjoint regions of concept-space (circles 1 and 2 are separate).

Discourse is said to be vague if it encompasses a large but contiguous region of concept-space (a polymorphic form is not disjoint).

Syntactic ambiguity is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. Lojban doesn't have syntactic ambiguity.

Resources

• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_ambiguity
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Garden_path_sentence
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/That_that_is_is_that_that_is_not_is_not_is_that_it_it_is