Ambiguity

A statement with two or more meanings that may seem to exclude one another in the context. Grammatical ambiguity (amphibologia) occurs where a word has two or more possible word classes. For example, in "BILL POSTERS WILL BE PROSECUTED," the words "BILL POSTERS" could be either adjective and common noun or a proper name. Lexical ambiguity arises where one word has multiple senses (polysemous terms) or when two different words have the same sound (homonyms). Thus "present" is polysemous because it means both ‘current time’ and ‘gift,’ and "which" and "witch" are homonyms.