Lexical Ambiguity


Lexical ambiguity occurs at the level of the lexical items of a language: the same phonetic or written word-form represents items of different syntactic categories with different meanings, or a lexical item of a certain category has multiple senses.

Here is an example where the lexeme BOOK has two senses:



Traditionally, two types of lexical ambiguity are distinguished:

  • Homonymy
    Several words have the same form but unrelated senses.

  • Polysemy
    A single lexical item has acquired different, but related, senses.