Syntactic ambiguity

Syntactic ambiguity occurs when the grammatical structure of a sentence allows for multiple interpretations.

Example: “The program loads files from the server during startup”

• Does “during startup” refer to the program’s startup, the server’s startup, or both?

Unlike lexical ambiguity (word meanings), syntactic ambiguity arises from how words are arranged and related to each other in a sentence.

Related: Lexical ambiguity, On ambiguity