A Study Of Intentional Ambiguity In English Under Relevance-adaption Theory

Ambiguity is a common phenomenon during our daily verbal communication and everylanguage may share such a feature of language while in English communication, we may finda lot of ambiguous sentences. Ambiguity can be classified into two subdivisions:unintentional ambiguity and intentional ambiguity from the perspective of communicativeeffects. The former is the contradiction of language structure and will hold back the normalcommunication so that we should try hard to avoid and remove it. Intentional ambiguity is apositive application of those linguistic contradictions; speakers may tactically employambiguous words or phrases in order to improve the situational effect or to supply a livelycommunicative impression or to realize their special communicative purposes. Intentionalambiguity applied, our language will be more interesting and humorous than before andambiguous sentences may provide some special linguistic effects such as simile, pun, andeuphemism. Therefore, intentional ambiguity will be explored in an all-round andcomprehensive perspective.The framework of the present thesis is Relevance-Adaptation model which originally putforward by Yang Ping and Ran Yongping on the basis of the weaknesses and strengthens ofRelevance theory and Adaptation theory. In relevance-adaptation model, when peoplecommunicate, their primary purpose is to seek optimal relevance of their utterance which isderived from the mutual adaptation of linguistic structure and context, and optimal relevanceis a dynamic process in which both communicative parties should make great efforts to realizethe communicative purposes or to successfully communicate. From this point,Relevance-Adaptation model provides a new and comprehensive theoretical model tointerpret linguistic communication.In this paper, the intentional ambiguity will be analyzed from the two processes ofutterance with the guidance of Relevance–Adaptation theoretical model, so as to deeply andsystematically understand the phenomenon of intentional ambiguity in English and helpEnglish learners make good use of such a linguistic skill in a right way to enhance thecharmer of language and enforce the effect of their expression and provide a new theoreticalframe work to accomplish similar research. Obviously, compared with the direct expression, intentional ambiguity needs moreefforts for speakers to realize and interpret the real communicative purpose, nevertheless,some special situational effect and special pragmatic function will be produced in this process,including attention-drawing, intention-realizing, topic-transferring and so on.The mechanism of both the generation and the interpretation of intentional ambiguity istentatively analyzed in this thesis and from the study, we find the two processes of intentionalambiguity both comply with the rules of Relevance-Adaptation model. The addresser adaptshim to various contexts and makes relevant choice of ambiguous words or phrases, while theaddressee adapts himself to the linguistic choices made by the addresser to achieve the mostrelevant interpretation.