Exploring morphological ambiguity in english lexicon

Abstract

This article examines morphological ambiguity in the English lexicon, focusing on how single word forms can have multiple morphological interpretations. Drawing on insights from generative morphology, psycholinguistics, and corpus-based studies, it identifies key sources of ambiguity, including affix attachment, zero derivation, and inflectional overlap. The study employs a qualitative descriptive methodology to analyze representative lexical items and their contextual usage, highlighting how frequency and syntactic cues influence interpretation. Findings indicate that morphological ambiguity is systematic, predictable, and integral to English lexical structure, with implications for language processing, teaching, and computational linguistics. The paper underscores the importance of context in disambiguation and encourages further research into real-time language comprehension of ambiguous forms.