英语论文网

the seaport at midnight. Paraphrase two: They passed the port wine at midnight. (2) The captain corrected the list. Paraphrase one: The captain corrected the list. Paraphrase two: The captain corrected the inventory. (3) Visiting relatives can be boring. Paraphrase one: It can be boring to visit relatives. Paraphrase two: Relatives who are visiting can be boring. According to the causes of ambiguity within the sentence, ambiguous sentences can be further divided into two types: lexical and structural. Lexical ambiguity is ambiguity attributable to the fact that some ambiguous words contained in the sentence causes the whole sentence to be ambiguous, which is illustrated by (1) and (2) above. Structural ambiguity is ambiguity does not lie in the words but rests on two or more possibilities of relationship of modification among words contained in the sentence, which as Chomsky puts it, has one surface structure but two or more different deep structures. (3) is an example of structural ambiguity. It must be pointed out that practically it is hard to draw a clear line between lexical and structural ambiguity. What we have illustrated here are only clear cases. The following example shows that the ambiguity arises from both lexicon and structure: We saw her duck. Paraphrase one: We saw her lower her head. Paraphrase two: We saw the duck belonging to her. 4. The Relationship between Ambiguous Words and Ambiguous Sentences As mentioned above, in the dictionary most of the lexemes are polysemous and some are in the relation of A Discussion on Ambiguity in English homonymy. But when they are arranged to form a sentence, we may come across three possibilities: (1) The sentence is still ambiguous. This kind of relation is called ambiguity persistence. For example: (a) He went to the BANK yesterday. (b) They passed the PORT at midnight. (c) The captain corrected the LIST. The capitalized words in each sentence are all ambiguous and the three sentences are also ambiguous. The phenomenon of ambiguity persistence is simply due to the fact that the sentence itself still permits a context, semantical or grammatical, in which the ambiguous word is still allowed to have two or more different senses. (2) The sentence is not ambiguous although it contains some ambiguous word(s). This kind of relation is called ambiguity elimination. Examples are so many that we just mention a few. (d) A KIND young man helped me to CROSS the road. (e) A pike is a KIND of fish. (f) I’m very CROSS with you. Also, the capitalized words are ambiguous but none of these sentences is ambiguous. Strictly speaking, not only the capitalized words but also all the other words in these sentences are polysemous if you look them up in the dictionary. This suggests that ambiguity elimination works whenever ambiguous words enter sentence (1) and when the sentence itself creates a sufficient context so that all the ambiguous words are related to each other in a certain semantic field, which only makes one of the senses of each ambiguous word explicit, ambiguity is then completely eliminated. So ambiguity persistence is only a case in which the elimination is not complete, and to eliminate it completely is to apply more contexts or adjust some of its parts. For example, the ambiguous sentence “He went to the bank yesterday” can be eliminated either by applying more contexts, as has been done in the first part