There are totally three kinds of ambiguity,namely phonological,lexical and syntactic ambiguity.

Garden path sentences are caused either by lexical ambiguity or syntactic ambiguity.

The paper attempts to analyze how syntactic ambiguity arises by employing Functional Grammar s metafunctional theory and the concept of rank.

This paper reviews the history of ambiguity research in the European and American linguistic academic field,introduces the research achievements of the linguistic field of the former Soviet Union and Russia and the Russian academic field of our country.

In the recent 60 years,modern Chinese ambiguity research can be divided into three stages,and they are a continuous renewing and progressive process in both methods and content from the analysis of ambiguity structure,forms,sentence patterns,types to ambiguity index,differentiation,cognition,dispelling and the discussion about the relationship between ambiguity and pragmatics.