Study On Ambiguity In The Formation And Application Of English Puns

Although, people often request the precision in the course of using language, paying attention to the conciseness and comprehensiveness of language, language phenomena are complex and sometimes what communicators say is not really what they mean, which will cause some misunderstanding. As a linguistic phenomenon, ambiguity is universal, existing in all languages. It is the essential mechanism for the generation of ambiguity. When a word has more than one meaning, a structure manifests more than one structural relation and an utterance shows different intentions, ambiguity will occur. Traditionally people regard ambiguity as misuse or taboo in a language, however, it is not really the case. On the contrary, it has positive functions.On the other hand, with the development of society, once taking a minor position in rhetorics for a long period, puns have penetrated in all kinds of fields in life now. Although it is known that, as a creative device in language activity, pun has been frequently seen in such written or oral forms as riddles, jokes, commercial advertisements and literary works in the hope of achieving a unique expressive effect, where its glamour originates from, few of people have careful thinking. Actually a pun's charm lies in ambiguity.In actual use of language, sometimes, to obtain a special expressive effect, people may use two meanings of a word form or a sound and produce a type of ambiguity on purpose. This type of ambiguity is "positive ambiguity". Although we shall do our best to avoid the use of unintentional ambiguity in everyday communication, as for this type of rhetorical device, we deliberately create ambiguity, just because the essence of a pun lies in its ambiguity and the major meaning the speaker intends to express can also be found in the ambiguity. Actually ambiguity acts as a positive role in this of figure of speech. Since the two special language phenomena are closely related, this article tries to make a qualitative analysis:in theory, systematically illustrating the roles of ambiguity in formation of pun; while in actual use, generally summarizing the roles of ambiguity in application of pun.Chapter I is an introduction. In this chapter you will know the significance, the purpose and the methodology of the study.Chapter II focuses on previous studies on English puns and ambiguity abroad and at home, the definitions of ambiguity and the most important one, the classification of ambiguity. The author classifies English ambiguity from two respects, linguistic ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity. From the linguistic respect, the ambiguity is static and it can be divided into lexical, phonological and grammatical ambiguity. On the contrary, from pragmatic respect, the ambiguity is dynamic and there are contextual ambiguity, speech act ambiguity and cooperative principle ambiguity.Chapter III displays pun's definitions and puts forward the comparative systematical and detailed classification of pun by Professor Wen Jun, who states that puns can be sub-classified into the following five types:homophonic puns, paronomasia puns, antalaclasis, sylleptic puns and asteismus. In addition, the focus is set on the features of the pun. From the viewpoint of Archibald A. Hill (1985:449-450), an English pun has three essential parts, namely, double context, hinge and trigger, which are also the standard to differ the ambiguity from pun.Chapter IV highlights the analysis of the formation of pun from the perspective of linguistic and contextual ambiguity. In order to specify the abstract linguistic phenomenon, the author introduces a semantic triangle to illustrate the lexical ambiguity and phonological ambiguity in the formation of pun thorough the analysis of the relationship among word form, sound and meaning. And also the grammatical ambiguity is better explained with the help of tree diagram. The linguistic ambiguity is the comparatively simple factors and it is the basis in the formation of pun while the contextual ambiguity forms the complicated one. As the context is the fundamental factor that affects the formation of pun, the author expounds on the contextual ambiguity in the formation of pun from the three aspects, the background knowledge, situational knowledge and culture.In chapter V, after the theoretical overview of the formation of pun, the author transfers the focus to the application of pun in which the author describes the roles played by the ambiguity in the discourse, rhetoric and aesthetic fields. Rhetoric functions of puns cover the functions of humor and satire in literature, persuasive effect in advertisement and provoking thought in riddle respectively. Apart from this, in discourse people use ambiguity to avoid conflict, protect oneself, and transfer topic etc. As for aesthetic function, it can generate beauty from conciseness, rhyme and rhythm, reservation and irony.Chapter six naturally comes to the conclusions drawn from the discussion and research in the thesis, followed by the limitation and implication for future study. The ultimate purpose of the thesis is to provide readers with a comparatively new picture of ambiguity in the formation of pun and then have comprehensive understanding of functions of ambiguity in application of pun, so that people can use pun freely and achieve a successful communication or achieve the expected effects.This article is a beneficial attempt, aiming to provide some help for pun researchers and to offer a few ordinary introductory remarks so that others may offer their valuable ideas. It is sincerely hoped that pun can attracts more attention, and that this article can act as a model and also a reference for developing research in pun.