Ambiguity

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Equivocation

Equivocation, 'to call by the same name', refers to a single word with multiple possible senses / meanings, and usually specifially refers to a shift between them leading to some form of confusion.

In terms of cause, and linguistic terms for it, see e.g.

• words being polysemous
• words being homographs, homophones, or similar
• metaphors, or one of many similar reasons have more than one sense.
• more basic lexical ambiguity - the 'one word has multiple meanings assigned'

If used in rhetoric this easily leads to a fallacy of some sort, as you don't clarify possibly-confusable concepts and easily end up blending among multiple on accident. ...or on purpose.

This may allow a twisty argument to appear more sensible than it is.

See also conflation, false equivalence, and various related terms)}}

The area of metaphor, metonymy, might be involved in equivocation, but then often not the cause or core of it.

Things like vagueness, unclear syntax, pragmatic multiple interpretation, unclear reference, unclear deixis are usually even further removed.

Amphibology

Amphibology (also amphiboly) is similar to equivocation, but often considered the grammatical variation of it: Offering sentences (or fragments) easily interpreted in more than way because of syntax, punctuation or such. For example: "I once shot an elephant in my pajamas",

There are very similarly confusing (and amusing) sentences that problematic in the details than in their grammar. For example, "Dog for sale. Will eat anything. Especially fond of children." is more about assumptions and priming than about referents or grammar; "Enraged cow injures farmer with axe" works out more or less how you thought, except you're led to think for a second that the cow might've been wielding it somehow.

Garden path sentence

A garden path sentence (named for the expression 'to be led up the garden path', to be misled) is one for which the most obvious partial parse while reading will lead to an interpretation that becomes obviously wrong (syntactically, semantically/pragmatically, and not always).

Often caused by a structure that, in reading, interacts badly with our mostly one-directional interpretation.

Happens more in written text, because spoken text tends to have more prosody (stress, tone, pauses) to suggest one interpretation as the intended one.

For example:

• "The old man the boat"
  • initially partially understood as "The man, who is old...", running into trouble with 'the', because you were probably expecting a verb.
  • ending up with "The boat is manned by the old people".

• "The horse raced past the barn fell"
  • initially: "There was a horse racing past a barn..." (racing as a main verb)
  • finally: "There was a horse, that was being raced past a barn, and that horse fell over"
  • helped by the lexical category ambiguity in 'raced' - can be a past-tense verb, or a passive participle

• "Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana"
  • also demonstrating that interpretation is subject to semantic/pragmatical knowledge

Note that using too few commas can lead to this (e.g. "You are right there are many...", ), though it's so common and expectable that you don't really have to backtrack very much.