On Purposeful Ambiguity From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

Ambiguity, as a common linguistic phenomenon, has always been focused on byscholars. In terms of communicative effects, ambiguity could be divided into twocategories: purposeful ambiguity and unintentional ambiguity. The former is a kind ofcommunicative strategy which is used for achieving some certain communicativepurposes by language users. The latter belongs to a kind of structural contradiction oflanguage which should be avoided. At present, linguists mainly pay attention on theclassification of ambiguity, the distinction between purposeful ambiguity andunintentional ambiguity, and the way that eliminating unintentional ambiguity. Thisthesis mainly talks about the purposeful ambiguity.Considering the complex of the purposeful ambiguity itself, it should beanalyzed systematically and fully. The thesis is based on the framework of relevancetheory, which is used for dwelling on the generative mechanism. The most importantpart is to interpret the way to achieve the purposeful ambiguity and its pragmaticfunctions. The sources are from the American popular sitcom Friends.This thesis makes such a conclusion from the perspective of relevance theory.The communicative effects of purposeful ambiguity, namely, the extra effects areachieved for the extra efforts during the process of searching for optimal relevance ofan utterance against its maximal relevance. The communicative effects will cost thelanguage users’ extra efforts. As will be shown in the thesis, this thesis gets anotherconclusion by analyzing the purposeful ambiguity aroused by sound, meaning,structure, rhetoric, context and indirect speech acts, which is purposeful ambiguitycould finish these functions: realizing principles of politeness,maintaining the face,protecting oneself, avoiding the conflicts,realizing purposes and fulfilling thecommunicative tasks.From the perspective of pragmatics, it is a useful and new attempt to studypurposeful ambiguity with a case study on Friends, which could lead the languageusers to understand its features fully and systematically. It will help language usersemploy this strategy correctly and appropriately for the special communicative purposes as well as implicate English learners to study language.Therefore, it is verymeaningful to understand and use purposeful ambiguity for successfulcommunication.