Ambiguity In English And Their Pragmatic Functions

Ambiguity is one of the fundamental properties of languages. It is a common phenomenon in many languages. Ambiguity is a special relationship between a linguistic structural form and its meaning. A structural form which conveys more than one meaning is ambiguous. The phenomenon of English ambiguity is mainly reflected in these aspects: lexical ambiguity, phonetic ambiguity, grammatical ambiguity and pragmatic ambiguity.It is the uniqueness - the indeterminacy of meaning - that makes ambiguity be of great vitality in language practice .In many linguistic situations, ambiguity is intentionally employed to achieve certain special pragmatic purposes.Based on the common types of ambiguity, this paper presents a tentative study of the positive aspect of ambiguity from the following three aspects: literary works, advertising and humors. Hopefully this paper will be of some use to people's attitude toward ambiguity: from negligence to making good use of it to achieve the magical effect of humor, euphemism, striking, mocking, etc.