A Research On Causes Of Ambiguity In English

Since ambiguity is pervasive in English, this paper makes a research on the causes of ambiguity from four aspects: phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity. From the perspective of phonology, the written forms have disguised the prosodic features of an expression and ambiguity arises from intonation, stress, homophony and liaison. When an expression is read with different intonation type or different placement of stress, it tends to be ambiguous since intonation and stress play important parts in meaning construction. Homophony and liaison are also the factors that result in ambiguity in spoken English. Homonymy and polysemy, the essential features of a language's economy and efficiency which are the causes of lexical ambiguity. Both polysemy and homonymy can arise in native ways or under the influence of foreign languages. Syntactically, ambiguity arises from multiple constituent structures, multiple syntactic functions and ellipsis. Not only are constituents arranged in linear order, but also there exist hierarchical relations called constituent structures between the constituents in a sentence (phrase). Sometimes the same linear order of constituents corresponds to more than one constituent structure, which is the potential one of the causes of syntactic ambiguity. The syntactic function shows the relationship between an element and other elements in a sentence. Syntactic ambiguity also results in the fact that a sentence element can play more than one syntactic role in a sentence. Ellipsis is a grammatical device for avoiding repetition and achieving textual cohesion. Syntactic ambiguity may as well appear in the case where ellipsis exists. Pragmatically, ambiguity arises from three aspects: multiple forces, conversational implicature and cultural difference. Theories of Speech Acts Theory and Cooperative Principle are employed to explain how pragmatic ambiguity is triggered.