The following is a partial list of linguistic example sentences illustrating various linguistic phenomena.

Ambiguity

Different types of ambiguity which are possible in language.

Lexical ambiguity

Demonstrations of words which have multiple meanings dependent on context.

Syntactic ambiguity

Demonstrations of ambiguity between alternative syntactic structures underlying a sentence.

Syntactic ambiguity, incrementality, and local coherence

Demonstrations of how incremental and (at least partially) local syntactic parsing leads to infelicitous constructions and interpretations.

Scope ambiguity and anaphora resolution

Embedding

Punctuation

Punctuation can be used to introduce ambiguity or misunderstandings where none needed to exist. One well known example, for comedic effect, is from A Midsummer Night's Dream by William Shakespeare (ignoring the punctuation provides the alternate reading).

Word order

Ending sentence with preposition

Some prescriptive grammar prohibits "preposition stranding": ending sentences with prepositions.

Avoidance

Compound use

Neurolinguistics

Sentences with unexpected endings. Comparative illusion:

Combinatorial complexity

Demonstrations of sentences which are unlikely to have ever been said, although the combinatorial complexity of the linguistic system makes them possible.

Semantics and context

Demonstrations of sentences where the semantic interpretation is bound to context or knowledge of the world.

Relevance conditionals

Conditionals where the prejacent ("if" clause) is not strictly required for the consequent to be true.

Non-English examples

Ojibwe

Latin

Mandarin Chinese

Japanese

Czech

Korean

German

Dutch

Persian

A famous example for lexical ambiguity in Persian is the following sentence: بخشش لازم نیست اعدامش کنید It can be read either as: which means "Forgiveness! no need to execute him/her" Or as: which means "Forgiveness not needed! execute her/him"

Polish

Finnish

Indonesian