Ambiguity
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Ambiguity is a state in which the meaning of a phrase, statement, situation, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several plausible interpretations. It arises when available information
Sir John Tenniel's illustration of the Caterpillar for Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland is noted for its ambiguous central figure, whose head can be viewed as either a man's face with a pointed nose and chin smoking a pipe or as the end of an actual caterpillar, with the first two right "true" legs visible (1865).
Which is wet: the food, or the cat?
Semantics
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Semantics is the study of linguistic meaning. It examines what meaning is, how words get their meaning, and how the meaning of a complex expression depends on its parts. Part of this process involves
Ambiguity
…Ambiguity is a state in which the meaning of a phrase, statement, situation, or resolution is not explicitly defined, making for several plausible interpretations. It arises when available…
Semantics is not focused on subjective speaker meaning and is instead interested in public meaning, like the meaning found in general dictionary definitions.
The distinction between sense and reference was first introduced by the philosopher Gottlob Frege.
Bhartṛhari developed and compared various semantic theories of the meaning of words.
Michel Bréal coined the French term sémantique and conceptualized the scope of this field of inquiry.