result in more than one interpretation in cases of miscommunication or when the speaker constructs the context appropriately to serve a rhetorical purpose (Poesio 12).
A somewhat different approach to semantic ambiguity, which actually elides into discussion of lexical ambiguity, is presented by Levine, who uses the term "semantic structure ambiguity" to bring in the idea of the framework or pattern, which comprises many parts. The explanatory statement is that "semantic ambiguity can arise at the phrase level from alternative available semantic relationships between/among the constituents of the phrase " (Levine 390).
Lexical ambiguity deals with problematics of meaning of the many parts or constituents that compose the pattern or structure. In Palmer's formulation, lexical semantics, and by implication lexical ambiguity, becomes a subset of semantics and semantic ambiguity inasmuch as it would link multiple "sense relations [] associated with the word or lexical item/lexeme and with a lexical structure" (914). Lexical ambiguity would refer to the relationship between the component parts of a (presumably) meaningful structure in need of being "disambiguated."
The attribute of reference as Palmer uses it points in the direction of pragmatics and is outside the scope of this research. Asher and Lascarides (72) also suggest a pragmatic linkage to rhetorical content according as disambiguation assumes the auditor/reader will bring preexisting knowledge to the exercise. But in fact the reader brings preexisting knowledge to language no matter what its intent is. Meanwhile, Eco distinguishes between structural semantics, which "deals with meaning, thus with a theory of signification," and truth-conditional semantics, which has complex attributes and which also points in the direction of pragmatics (Eco 207).
For purposes of this research, semantic ambiguity and lexical ambiguity are to be basically delinked from pragmatics. Howev...