A Discussion on Ambiguity in English [2]
论文作者:ZHANG Qing-liang1论文属性:短文 essay登出时间:2009-04-03编辑:黄丽樱点击率:8212
论文字数:2118论文编号:org200904031529064573语种:中文 Chinese地区:中国价格:免费论文
关键词:ambiguitysemanticscontextEnglishClassification
not tolerate children”. The sentence is ambiguous only because it has no more contexts than the sentence itself. By putting enough contexts to make the ambiguous word contained in a certain semantic field; the ambiguity is eliminated, as is illustrated by the following sentences:
A: She cannot bear children if they are noisy.
B: She cannot bear children because she is sterile.
Thirdly, it is necessary to notice that our definition is confined to the descriptive meaning, or the conception meaning of an expression or a sentence. Such sentences as “It’s very cold today”, which may on certain occasion mean “Oh, please close the window” are not within our concern.
3. The Classification of Ambiguity
From different angles, ambiguity can be divided into different types. According to whether it is in the word-form (including other forms smaller than a sentence) or in the sentence form, ambiguity can be classified as ambiguous words or ambiguous sentences.
3.1 Ambiguous words include two kinds of linguistic phenomena: homonymy and polysemy
3.1.1 Homonymy
A case of homonymy is one of an ambiguous word, where different cases are far apart from each other and not obviously related to each other in any way. Homonymy can be further divided into three types.
(1) Homographs: words that have the same spelling but differ in sound and meaning are called homographs, e.g. bow/baU/ v. (bend the head and body in respect)—bow/bEU/n. (a device for shooting arrows); wind/waind/v (turn or make revolve)—wind/wind/n. (air in motion).
(2) Homophones: Words that are identical in sound but differ in spelling and meaning are called homophones, e.g. air—heir, see—sea.
(3) Full homonyms: Words that are identical in sound and spelling are called full homonyms, e.g. ball n. (a round object used in games)—ball n. (a gathering of people for dancing).
Homonyms are good candidates for humor, as well as for confusion, e.g.:
“How is bread made?”
“I know that”. Alice cried eagerly. “you take some flour.”
“Where do you pick the flower?” The White Queen asked, “in a garden or in the hedges?”
“Well, it isn’t picked at all.” Alice explained. “It’s ground.”
“How many acres of ground?” said the White Queen.
The humor of this passage is based on two sets of homonyms: flower and flour and two meanings of ground.
Case of homonymy seems very few in a language system and very definitely to be matters of mere accident or coincidence.
3.1.2 Polysemy
A case of polysemy is one where a word has several clearly related senses, e.g. mouth (of a river vs. of an animal), the two senses are clearly related by the concept of an opening from the interior of some solid mass to the outside, and of a place of issue at the end of some long narrow channel. Chimney ( pipe of a tunnel-like structure on a building for smoke to escape through vs. narrow vertical space rocks up which a climber can wriggle by pressing against the sides), both senses contain the concept of a narrow vertical shaft in some solid material. Cases of polysemy are numerous in a language system. In the dictionary, the great majority of lexical items are polysemous.
In practice it is impossible to draw a clear line between homonymy and polysemy. However, our concentration will not be laid on the relatedness of the senses of the ambiguous words but on the means of disambiguating.
3.2 Ambiguous sentences
A sentence is ambiguous if it has two (or more) paraphrases which are not themselv
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