1351: Syntactic Ambiguity: Same Meanings Aug 23, 2018

Lexical and syntactic ambiguity have been discussed here several times, but there are ways for a sentence to be syntactically ambiguous but only have one essential meaning. In the sentence, "I went out to lunch", it is not clear necessarily whether 'lunch' is a verb or a noun. In this case 'to' can indicate that 'lunch' is an infinitive verb, or be a preposition and refer to 'lunch' as a place where lunch is eaten. There is no way to be sure, but ultimately it is the same meaning.