The Interpretative Effect Of Context On Ambiguity From Pragmatic Perspective

People often request the precision in the course of using languages, paying attention to the conciseness and comprehensiveness of language. However, language phenomena are complex. Sometimes what communicators say is not really what they mean, which will cause some misunderstanding in between. As a linguistic phenomenon, ambiguity is universal, existing in all languages. As early as the 18^th century, Wilhelm Von Humboldt pointed out that, the language was the infinite exploitation to the limited means. It was a creative activity (Robin, 1987). It is the essential mechanism for the generation of ambiguity (Qiu Shude, 1998). When a word has more than one meaning, a structure manifests more than one structural relations and an utterance shows different intentions, ambiguity will occur.Ambiguity is very popular in human languages, and thus one of the significant subjects in the field of language study. The research on ambiguity therefore, not only plays a vital part in the development of this theory but also can show implications on the other fields, particularly can guide the practice of English teaching. As far as college students' reading comprehension is concerned, it undoubtedly turns out to be a most critical factor which might definitely restrict their ability. The tradional studies on ambiguity mainly focus on the forms themselves (phonologic, lexical, grammatical, etc.), exploring the several possible interpretations of the same linguistic unit. However, its interpretation lies in its usages as well as in its forms. In addition, the meaning in isolation does not always correspond with the meaning in usage. This paper holds that the studies limited to the meaning in isolation can be nothing but the base for the studies on ambiguity and it is considerably far from the major purpose of the studies on ambiguity which is aimed at exploring the 'signifier' and specifizing the "signified'.Based on the traditional researches on ambiguity, this study set out toilluminate that these studies exclusively in forms can indeed interpret some ambiguities. Take the IC analysis of Bloomfield for an example, it really works in eliminating the surface ambiguity resulting from different structural hierarchy. However, how to interpret certain ambiguities, for example, "He is like a fish", has always been a big trouble for traditional studies. Furthermore, after several years' teaching, I found out that the majority of the students are apt to do nothing but look up the dictionaries when meeting with ambiguities. Consequently, they always fail to catch its specific meaning in certain context. Therefore, this study tries to explore ambiguity from pragmatic perspective;the pragmatic perspective mentioned here refers to the three non-linguistic contexts. In view to the fact that the previous research touched little on this issue, the paper undoubtedly provides a new window for the study of ambiguity.Both text and discourse linguistics attach great importance to context which directly affect the comprehension and application of language. As far as ambiguity in text is concerned, context plays a very important role in interpreting it in text comprehension. Ambiguity means having more than two meanings and ways of comprehension. So how to interpret and eliminate ambiguity is the crucial factor of text comprehension. With the help of context theory, and also in combination with plenty of typical examples collected, this study is aimed at illustrating how the three non-linguistic contexts eliminate and interpret ambiguity in text comprehension.Due to the nature of the study, qualitative method is used. When it comes to the introduction of the theories of context and ambiguity as well as the illustration of non-linguistic contexts' role in interpreting ambiguity, altogether 68 examples are adopted, most of which are from journals, papers and literary works. The purpose of the thesis is to explain that the non-linguistic contexts work out well in removing ambiguity and also its implications on other fields, especially on college English teaching.The study unavoidably has its own limitations. Since it covers all the threenon-linguistic contexts, the introduction to them is sure to be rough and sketchy. In fact, each of them is capable of constituting a whole chapter and worth making a further exploration. Furthermore, the ambiguity here is only limited to its negative aspects while the positive functions are seldom touched on, which also deserves enough attention. The above is just the next target I will explore later.