Vagueness and ambiguity

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Ambiguous discourse (upper row, circles 1 and 2 are separate) and vague discourse (lower row, one polymorphic form is not disjoint).

Discourse is said to be ambiguous when it encompasses potentially disjoint regions of concept-space.

Discourse is said to be vague if it encompasses a large but contiguous region of concept-space.

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.

Example

Note that the following example isn't syntactically ambiguous:

la fred pu viska lo vinji ca lo nu lo se xi vei mo'e zo'e no'a cu vofli ga'u la .Tsurix.
Fred saw the plane flying over Zurich.

It can be made more precise:

la fred. pu viska lo vinji ca lo nu fy. vofli ga'u la .Tsurix.
Fred saw a plane when he was flying over Zurich.
la fred. pu viska lo vinji ca lo nu vy. vofli ga'u la .Tsurix.
Fred saw a plane, which was flying over Zurich.
la fred. pu viska le za'u cmana ca lo ka vofli ga'u la .Tsurix.
Fred saw the mountains when he was flying over Zurich.

See also

Resources