adjective
COLLOCATIONS FROM OTHER ENTRIES
an ambiguous/vague concept (= one that is not clear or is hard to define )
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Creativity is an ambiguous concept.
COLLOCATIONS FROM CORPUS
■ ADVERB
highly
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It is either tautologous, positively dangerous, unoriginal or highly ambiguous .
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The main problem with constructing such a map is that there are circumstances in which the map is highly ambiguous .
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But words have a highly ambiguous status: they are human artefacts but they are also very like natural species.
more
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In this there is a much more ambiguous and open positioning of the subject.
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His South Dakota activities are more ambiguous .
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The gains to be made in the political sphere are, as Chapter S will show, more ambiguous and contradictory.
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Socially, the impact has been more ambiguous .
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Over-generation &038; Syntactic Ambiguity Sentences are much more ambiguous than one would normally expect.
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Some verbs are more ambiguous than others.
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Human nature and human achievements have come to appear far more ambiguous than the progressive hopes of the nineteenth century admitted.
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Another, far more ambiguous and strange way, can be found in Alain Robbe-Grillet's Jealousy.
somewhat
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As is well known, Marx himself gave a somewhat ambiguous answer; but Poulantzas' reply is quite clear.
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For many years teachers had occupied a somewhat ambiguous position.
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The excavations revealed somewhat ambiguous structural evidence for a furnace with the discovery of a firing trench.
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And its faxed decision seemed somewhat ambiguous .
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Government policies have been somewhat ambiguous .
■ NOUN
position
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I was in an ambiguous position .
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For many years teachers had occupied a somewhat ambiguous position .
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The Labour Party remained in an ambiguous position .
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The critic Greenberg acknowledged the ambiguous position the avant-garde would need to maintain with its patrons.
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Feminists are more aware of this ambiguity than psychologists are of their similarly ambiguous position .
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Single women and there were many among the repealers-occupied a more ambiguous position .
word
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Equally, you might use ambiguous words which your superiors treat as a resignation which they will not allow you to retract.
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The second manner of semantic variation concerns the activation by different contexts of different senses associated with ambiguous word forms.
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The problem is not just one of poor acoustic input but also of ambiguous word boundaries.
EXAMPLES FROM OTHER ENTRIES
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an ambiguous question
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McClane's position in the company is ambiguous .
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She left a very ambiguous message on the answerphone last night.
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The document's ambiguous wording makes it very difficult to follow.
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The last part of her letter was deliberately ambiguous .
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The results of the experiments were ambiguous and they will have to be done again.
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Unfortunately the instructions were ambiguous and we didn't know which part of the program to run.
EXAMPLES FROM CORPUS
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He liked to keep the story of his life ambiguous .
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In the first place, most of its key concepts are essentially ambiguous .
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Le Touquet's identity today is a little ambiguous but it still has a nice feel about it.
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Like a true oracle, Hailey's pronouncements were both authoritative and ambiguous .
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Mitterrand had ambiguous relations with money, the power of which he regularly lambasted.
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The Labour Party remained in an ambiguous position.
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Where Tudor is economical, organic and disciplined, Stevenson is fussy, distracted and ambiguous .