浅析英语中的歧义现象及其应用
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浅析英语中的歧义现象及其应用 Analysis on Ambiguity and Its Application in English
Ⅰ.Introduction Ambiguity is the nature of language. Kess and Hoppe once said in Ambiguity in Psycholinguistics: “Upon careful consideration, one cannot but be amazed at the ubiquity of ambiguity in language.”(李娜,2003:6) To describe and explain ambiguity in languages is one of the goals of semantics theory. Both words and sentences in English may have more than one meaning, and some ambiguous sentences such like “Flying planes can be dangerous” are all familiar to us. Generally, ambiguity is defined as the fact that a word (or an expression) or a sentence, before realization of stress, stop, intonation or other phonological means and without any more presuppositions or contexts than what the word or the sentence itself creates, can be regarded as two or more different descriptive senses (Zhang Qing-liang, 2007:6). For some linguists, every expression or sentence, before realized by phonological means, is ambiguous. Just like the phrase “English teacher”, it can be explained as “a teacher who teaches English, whether he is English is unknown”; or “the teacher is from Britain, whether he teaches English is unknown”. So we can suppose that when ambiguity appears, there are no more contexts than the sentence or the phrase itself. Mo is confined to the descriptive meaning or the conception meaning of an expression. Sentence like “It’s dark in the room” may imply the meaning “Please turn on the light”. This kind of expression is not included in the discussion of this paper. How does ambiguity come out? The reason can be amount of. Some are caused by phonological aspects, such as the wrong stress or intonation; some are caused by lexicon, using polysemy in speaking or writing, and some different uses in American English and British English can also be ambiguous; some are caused by grammar, or we can say from the view of syntactic structure, just like the sentence above “Flying planes can be dangers”; some are caused by some ellipsis in the sentences. No matter what kind of reason that causes ambiguity, this phenomenon makes English more interesting. People use it to make fun in expression to achieve pragmatic effect in speaking and writing. But at the same time, it also brings some trouble to English learners. In the following sections, this thesis will offer some detailed analysis on ambiguity and its application in English.
phenomena do not have clear cut. But our concentration does not lie on the relatedness of senses of the ambiguous words but on the means of disambiguating. Many researches have turned out how ambiguous words such as bug or rose are understood. There are two theories: the first one believes that all the meanings associated with the word are accessed, and the other theory is that only one meaning is accessed initially (胡壮麟, 2001:198). For example: a. After taking the right turn at the intersection…
(right is ambiguous: correct vs. rightward) b. After taking the left turn at the intersection…
(left is unambiguous) In these two sentences we can see that all meanings of ambiguous words are accessed and that time has to be taken to decide among them. Other experts suggest that under some circumstances, only one meaning is initially accessed. The word chair has two meanings—an object to sit on and the head of a department or committee, but the former is more frequently used. So when chair appears, the first meaning is remembered ahead. These two theories can help the English learners to learn words from the psychological view. 2.2 Sentence Ambiguity According to the discussion aboved, ambiguity also includes sentence ambiguity, that is to say, a sentence can be ambigous structually or meaningly. A sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more paraphrases. For example: a. Visiting relatives can be boring. Paraphrases 1: It can be boring to visit relatives. Paraphrases 2: Relatives who are visiting now are boring. b. Flying planes can be dangerous. Paraphrases 1: To fly planes can be dangerous. Paraphrases 2: The planes that are flying can be dangerous. c. I know Mary better than you. Paraphrases 1: I know Mary better than I know you. Paraphrases 2: I know Mary better then you know her. The sentences above are all ambiguous. One interesting phenomenon concerning certain ambiguous sentences is called the “garden path”. Garden path sentences are initially interpreted with a different structure than they actually have. If it is proved that the initial choice is wrong, it takes a long time to find out another structure to analyze the sentence. Sometimes people couldn’t find out the way at all, they have been “led up to the garden path”, fooled into thinking another sentence structure than it has. An important question in dealing with ambiguous sentence is that how people decide which structure an ambiguous sentence has. They may choose the best one from all considerations, or they may choose one structure under some certain strategies. If the structure does not work out, they may reconsider. The garden path phenomenon suggests that for at least some ambiguities, people try one analysis of an ambiguous sequence of words first and only become aware of the other possibility when the one tried first does not work out. This phenomenon can also help the English learners to learn sentence structure or grammar.
Ⅱ.Categories of Ambiguity From different angles, ambiguity can be divided into different types. According to whether it is the word-form (including phrases) or in the sentence form, ambiguity can be classified as words ambiguity and sentence ambiguity (Zhang Qingliang, 2007:6). 2.1 Words Ambiguity Words ambiguity contains two linguistic phenomena: homonymy and polysemy. The term homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. For example, the word wind /waind/ v. (turn or make revolve)—wind /wind/ n. (air in motion); ball n.(around object used in games)—ball n.(a gathering of people for dancing) ;sea—see. In the sentence Give me some /flauə/, /flauə/ can be either flower or flour, because these two words have the some sound. Polysemy means one form (written or spoken) have multiple meanings which are all related by extension. The word “bank” is one example. I’m going to the bank can be either understood as “我去岸边” or “我去银 行”. It is important to draw a clear distinction between homonymy and polysemy, although these two
Ⅰ.Introduction Ambiguity is the nature of language. Kess and Hoppe once said in Ambiguity in Psycholinguistics: “Upon careful consideration, one cannot but be amazed at the ubiquity of ambiguity in language.”(李娜,2003:6) To describe and explain ambiguity in languages is one of the goals of semantics theory. Both words and sentences in English may have more than one meaning, and some ambiguous sentences such like “Flying planes can be dangerous” are all familiar to us. Generally, ambiguity is defined as the fact that a word (or an expression) or a sentence, before realization of stress, stop, intonation or other phonological means and without any more presuppositions or contexts than what the word or the sentence itself creates, can be regarded as two or more different descriptive senses (Zhang Qing-liang, 2007:6). For some linguists, every expression or sentence, before realized by phonological means, is ambiguous. Just like the phrase “English teacher”, it can be explained as “a teacher who teaches English, whether he is English is unknown”; or “the teacher is from Britain, whether he teaches English is unknown”. So we can suppose that when ambiguity appears, there are no more contexts than the sentence or the phrase itself. Mo is confined to the descriptive meaning or the conception meaning of an expression. Sentence like “It’s dark in the room” may imply the meaning “Please turn on the light”. This kind of expression is not included in the discussion of this paper. How does ambiguity come out? The reason can be amount of. Some are caused by phonological aspects, such as the wrong stress or intonation; some are caused by lexicon, using polysemy in speaking or writing, and some different uses in American English and British English can also be ambiguous; some are caused by grammar, or we can say from the view of syntactic structure, just like the sentence above “Flying planes can be dangers”; some are caused by some ellipsis in the sentences. No matter what kind of reason that causes ambiguity, this phenomenon makes English more interesting. People use it to make fun in expression to achieve pragmatic effect in speaking and writing. But at the same time, it also brings some trouble to English learners. In the following sections, this thesis will offer some detailed analysis on ambiguity and its application in English.
phenomena do not have clear cut. But our concentration does not lie on the relatedness of senses of the ambiguous words but on the means of disambiguating. Many researches have turned out how ambiguous words such as bug or rose are understood. There are two theories: the first one believes that all the meanings associated with the word are accessed, and the other theory is that only one meaning is accessed initially (胡壮麟, 2001:198). For example: a. After taking the right turn at the intersection…
(right is ambiguous: correct vs. rightward) b. After taking the left turn at the intersection…
(left is unambiguous) In these two sentences we can see that all meanings of ambiguous words are accessed and that time has to be taken to decide among them. Other experts suggest that under some circumstances, only one meaning is initially accessed. The word chair has two meanings—an object to sit on and the head of a department or committee, but the former is more frequently used. So when chair appears, the first meaning is remembered ahead. These two theories can help the English learners to learn words from the psychological view. 2.2 Sentence Ambiguity According to the discussion aboved, ambiguity also includes sentence ambiguity, that is to say, a sentence can be ambigous structually or meaningly. A sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more paraphrases. For example: a. Visiting relatives can be boring. Paraphrases 1: It can be boring to visit relatives. Paraphrases 2: Relatives who are visiting now are boring. b. Flying planes can be dangerous. Paraphrases 1: To fly planes can be dangerous. Paraphrases 2: The planes that are flying can be dangerous. c. I know Mary better than you. Paraphrases 1: I know Mary better than I know you. Paraphrases 2: I know Mary better then you know her. The sentences above are all ambiguous. One interesting phenomenon concerning certain ambiguous sentences is called the “garden path”. Garden path sentences are initially interpreted with a different structure than they actually have. If it is proved that the initial choice is wrong, it takes a long time to find out another structure to analyze the sentence. Sometimes people couldn’t find out the way at all, they have been “led up to the garden path”, fooled into thinking another sentence structure than it has. An important question in dealing with ambiguous sentence is that how people decide which structure an ambiguous sentence has. They may choose the best one from all considerations, or they may choose one structure under some certain strategies. If the structure does not work out, they may reconsider. The garden path phenomenon suggests that for at least some ambiguities, people try one analysis of an ambiguous sequence of words first and only become aware of the other possibility when the one tried first does not work out. This phenomenon can also help the English learners to learn sentence structure or grammar.
Ⅱ.Categories of Ambiguity From different angles, ambiguity can be divided into different types. According to whether it is the word-form (including phrases) or in the sentence form, ambiguity can be classified as words ambiguity and sentence ambiguity (Zhang Qingliang, 2007:6). 2.1 Words Ambiguity Words ambiguity contains two linguistic phenomena: homonymy and polysemy. The term homonymy refers to the phenomenon that words having different meanings have the same form, i.e., different words are identical in sound or spelling, or in both. For example, the word wind /waind/ v. (turn or make revolve)—wind /wind/ n. (air in motion); ball n.(around object used in games)—ball n.(a gathering of people for dancing) ;sea—see. In the sentence Give me some /flauə/, /flauə/ can be either flower or flour, because these two words have the some sound. Polysemy means one form (written or spoken) have multiple meanings which are all related by extension. The word “bank” is one example. I’m going to the bank can be either understood as “我去岸边” or “我去银 行”. It is important to draw a clear distinction between homonymy and polysemy, although these two