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Abstract: A word, phrase or sentence that has more than one meaning is said to be ambiguous. The paper is intended to study the definition and classification of ambiguity, the factors underlying ambiguity according to the research goal, method and criterion. Lexical ambiguity is associated with polysemy and homonymy, syntactic ambiguity is the result of different grouping of elements, and semantic ambiguity results from the different logical relationships between elements. 1. Introduction To describe and explain ambiguities in language is one of the goals of semantic theory. Both words and sentences can have more than one meaning, and the semantic rules a linguist sets up must state correctly for each language in which words and sentences have more than one meaning. It is well-known to almost every student in linguistics that such an ambiguous sentence as “Flying planes can be dangerous” was once one of the mortal weapons of Chomsky to the structuralists’ ICA. It is supposed that ambiguity may exist in any natural language system and efforts have been made to find some language universals. But opinions differ in deciding whether a sentence or word is ambiguous or not. The above problem is concerned with many factors. This essay is going to deal with three parts. 2. The Nature of Ambiguity To say something about the nature of ambiguity, we have, first of all, to try our best to give an explicit definition of ambiguity, which will help to constrain our scope of inquiry. Ambiguity is defined as the fact that a word (or an expression) or a sentence, before realization of stress, stop, intonation or other phonological means and without any more presuppositions or contexts than what the word or the sentence itself creates, can be regarded as two or more different descriptive senses. To make our definition clearly understood, it seems necessary to explain it in further detail. Some linguists think that almost every expression or sentence, before realized by phonological means, is ambiguous. For example, by putting stress on different parts of the following ambiguous expression “English teacher”, ambiguity is completely got rid of: English teacher= a teacher who teaches English, whether he is an Englishman is unknown; English teacher= a teacher from Britain, whether he teaches English is unknown. Another example may be the shifting of logical stress to create different presuppositions. Such a sentence as “He came here yesterday” may presuppose quite differently by shifting the local stress: He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not I, you, etc. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not ran, etc. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not other places. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not other days. It often happens that when we are talking, we don’t realize there is any ambiguity there but when we have it written down and isolate every sentence from the context, we will find that many of the sentences are ambiguous; and the more parts we divide the whole into, the more ambiguous we have. So secondly, we have to point out that ambiguity exists when there are no more contexts than the expression or sentence itself. For example “She can’t bear children” may be understood to mean “She is unable to give birth to children” or “She cannot tolerate children”. The sentence is ambiguous only because it has no more contexts than the sentence itself. By putting enough contexts to make the ambiguous word contained in