NLP Glossary: Second Position - Syntactic Ambiguity

Second Position

The process of visualizing a situation from the point of view of the person who you are interacting with. See First, and Third Position.

Secondary Gain

When a negative behavior has a positive function.

For instance lacking the confidence to go out and meet people provides the positive function of avoiding being rejected. Richard Bandler mentions in one of his books the story of a women who would not lose weight because she was scared that if she lost weight men would be attracted to her and she did not trust herself not to cheat on her husband. The secondary gain of her staying overweight was that it kept her marriage safe.

Sensory Acuity

The ability to notice tiny differences in sensory inputs, usually referring to slight changes in a clients responses and how they access memories/states.

Sensory Modalities

The five senses though which we perceive the world around us.

Sensory-Based Description

Describing an event through the senses.

State

The physiology and neurology of a specific action or behavior.

Strategy

The set of steps carried out to reach a particular outcome. In NLP this usually refers to the representational systems accessed used to reach the outcome.

Submodalities/Sub-modalities

Specific attributes related to individual Sensory Modalities. Within the Visual modality there are submodalities such as brightness and association. Within the auditory modality there are loudness, timbre etc.

Surface Structure

The words used to describe an event.

Swish Pattern

A simple submodality technique used to change how someone responds to a specific event. The swish pattern is described fully within the exercise on this site.

Synesthesia

Synesthesia occurs when there is an overlap between sensory modalities, such as when a taste is experienced as having a particular color.

Syntactic Ambiguity

From the milton-model, a statement which is ambiguous as to the subject a verb or adjective applies to. For instance, in the statement 'They were charming men and women' - are they charming men and charming women, or charming men and non-charming women.

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