Genuine lexical ambiguity allows a term to be used in either sense without contradiction, as demonstrated by 'funny' in sentence (3.6)

A reading of (3.6) is supposed to sound coherent given that ‘funny’ can mean ‘humorous’ or ‘strange’ whereas (3.7) is supposed to sound odd, even contradictory. If ‘inner-city’ were genuinely ambiguous in the way described above, we should be able to use it to mean ‘African American’ and get a coherent reading of (3.7).