A Study Of Pragmatic Ambiguity And Its Implication For English Teaching

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 ambiguity and its implication for English teaching. Combining theory with teaching practice, the author in this thesis tries to help students to adopt the strategies of eliminating negative ambiguity and to make use of positive ambiguity so as to cultivate their ability of analyzing and solving problem in an overall way.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 two types will be mentioned in this thesis. One is to classify ambiguity into phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, and pragmatic ambiguity on linguistic level. Another type is to classify it into deliberate ambiguity and unintentional ambiguity according to the utterance motivation and effects. Ambiguity caused by language structure such as phonological ambiguity, iexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity will be exposed or eliminated or used on pragmatic level. Therefore, pragmatic level is the most important part in the whole process of ambiguity movement. Meanwhile it is the study emphasis in this thesis.Pragmatic ambiguity plays both negative and positive roles. Negative ambiguity will be an obstacle to communication so it should be avoided as much as possible. This thesis classifies pragmatic ambiguity into five types according to formation of pragmatic ambiguity: discourse ambiguity, speech act ambiguity, implicature ambiguity, deixis ambiguity and presupposition ambiguity and makes a detailed analysis on formation of each kind. It also generalizes the features of pragmatic ambiguity: uncertainty, polysemy, indirectness and relavance. The purpose of studying the formation and features of pragmatic ambiguity is toeliminate the negative ambiguity and to make communication successful. Then strategies of disambiguating should be adopted.In accordance with the pragmatic ambiguity which can be easily found in students' reading, writing, translation and communication, effective ways are suggested to eliminate the ambiguities. The first method is offering proper context or adding elliptical parts to eliminate discourse ambiguity. Taking ambiguity in student's textbooks for example, the thesis illustrates how to disambiguate in context and the relationship between context and reading, communication and vocabulary. Then some suggestions are given on how to add the elliptical part to avoid ambiguity. The second method is helping students to understand illocutionary acts. Students should be helped to find out the illocutionary act of an utterance, which is real intention of speaker. The third method is helping students to understand conversational implicature since ambiguity in communication is often due to misunderstanding of conversational implicature. Giving students some questions and requiring them show disagreement without saying "no" is a good way to help students understand conversational implicature. The fourth method is giving clear deixis. Unclear deixis usually makes students composition ambiguous. Some mistake sentences are chosen and how to give clear deixis is suggested. The fifth method is supplying definite presupposition. Therefore, helping students to adopt strategies of disambiguating is very important to improve their abilities of listening, speaking, reading and writing.Negative ambiguity should be avoided. If it appears it should be eliminated at once. On the other hand, intentional ambiguity can create a special rhetorical effect or achieve a certain pragmatic goal. The purpose of eliminating ambiguity is to make a better use of it. From the study we find that ambiguity is used positively in English figures of speech such as pun, metaphor, irony, euphemism, etc. And intentional ambiguity has several pragmatic functions: creating humor, expressing sarcasm, covering harsh facts and protecting oneself. In many literary...