A Pragmatic Study Of Intentional Ambiguity

Ambiguity, as a common and pervasive language phenomenon, has long been of great concern to researchers. While, for a long time, ambiguity was mainly studied in the field of semantics, and it was regarded as a kind of language misuse. Recently, with the development of linguistics and the study of ambiguity in pragmatics, scholars have realized that ambiguity is not good for nothing and that it can be a strategy to achieve certain communicative needs when properly and intentionally employed in a certain context.The present study focuses on the intentional use of ambiguity, which is viewed as a communicative strategy and termed as"intentional ambiguity". Based on the previous findings on ambiguity, with Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory as the general conceptual framework, this thesis analyzes the dynamic nature of intentional ambiguity, constructing a framework consisting of its definition, production and functioning. Through the analysis and classification of the data, this thesis finds out that the ways of realizing intentional ambiguity are homonymy, polysemy, syntactic structure, rhetorical devices and so on. This thesis also points out that the functioning of intentional ambiguity, a communicative strategy, is closely related with two factors: contextual correlates (especially the social and mental world of the addressor) and communicative functions, namely, creating special communicative effects, face-saving, self-protection, and purpose-realizing.Through the present study, it can be found out that intentional ambiguity does perform certain functions in the process of communication. Therefore, in communication, people should make full use of ambiguity instead of excluding it blindly.Though this thesis has just made a preliminary study of intentional ambiguity, it is believed to change people's attitude towards ambiguity, help them communicate more effectively, and shed some light on related researches.