Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Ambiguity

Ambiguity has traditionally been regarded as a kind of language misuse, which, however, is a quite limited view of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not good-for-nothing. Instead, it can play an active role in helping people to achieve positive communication effects. This thesis is a tentative endeavor to synthesize the merits and to make up for the deficiencies of the achievements in ambiguity, with a focus on study of pragmatic functions of ambiguity, especially intentional ambiguity.As a universal linguistic phenomenon, ambiguity is concerned with every aspects of language. It can be classified into many types in different standard and perspectives. Among them three types will be mentioned in this thesis. One is to classify ambiguity into phonetic or phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, and pragmatic ambiguity on linguistic level. Another type is to classify it into intentional ambiguity and unintentional ambiguity according to the utterance motivation and effects. The last type is based on the hearer's reaction. Ambiguity can be classified as latent ambiguity and activated ambiguity. Except the first traditional classification, the other two kinds of classification highlight the fact that the creation and understanding of ambiguity are closely related with the two parties, speaker and hearer, who are involved in the communication.In the following part, the thesis focuses on the pragmatic functions of ambiguity, which is demonstrated from the four aspects. First, ambiguity is used in rhetorical device. Second, it is used in interpersonal communication with the functions as: self-protecting, conflict avoiding, politeness achieving, face keeping, purpose realizing, and task fulfilling, etc. Third, in advertisement, ambiguity can be adopted as a persuasive strategy to attract the customers and elicit their purchases. Fourth, ambiguity brings about increment in the effect if it is used in literature works.