Probing Into Disambiguation Of English Sentences Based On The Perspective Of Prominence

Ambiguous sentences deeply exist in our daily life and have been a central issue in the research of linguistics. Through all the researches at home and abroad, we can observe most of the works are pay attentions to structural linguistics, especially Saussure’s structural linguistics. We can not deny that structural linguistics can give a reasonable explanation to the phenomenon of English ambiguity; especially adopt hierarchy to the analysis of the structure in ambiguous sentences. But from another aspect, structural linguistics has its limitations, for it can’t completely display the understanding of language and it also can’t make a comprehensive explanation for ambiguous sentences. On the contrary, cognitive linguistics quickly develops and focuses on the research of the internal relationship and process in language,and emphasis on the interaction between experience and entities.Cognitive linguistics has proposed three perspectives of language: experiential, prominence, attentional. Among them, the perspective of prominence is the most suitable theory to analyzes English ambiguous sentences, thus this thesis choose the combination of English ambiguous sentences and prominence into research.Prominence has important meanings to the research of English ambiguous sentences. Firstly, Research English ambiguous sentences with prominence totally overture the traditional linguistics which can make up defect of structural linguistics. Prominence is a branch of cognitive linguistics and can help to analyzes ambiguous sentences with a system, integrated perspective instead of a modular, dispersed perspective. Secondly, prominence opens a new angle to the research of English ambiguous sentences which can strongly illustrates the process of eliminate ambiguity in detail. Especially the famous linguist Langacker proposed the concept of “Encyclopedia” which stresses on use dynamic, humanistic, subjective experience to understanding semantic meanings. The perspective of prominence is based on this view and regard different cognitive perspectives can produce different methods of expressions and understandings. Thus, adopt prominence in the study of English ambiguous sentences can not only break the limitation of traditional linguistics but also provide people with a new method to understanding language and eliminate ambiguity. Furthermore, it can even help people in the English reading, writing, translation and daily communication with prominence theory.The contents of this thesis mainly include three parts: The first part introduce the research on English ambiguous sentences and research on prominence in cognitive linguistic abroad and at home. Throughout the ambiguity research in history and in recent years, we can find that there are still less of works concentrated on the angle of cognitive linguistics. The second part is introducing Langacker’s cognitive grammar. Cognitive domain and imagery are both the two main factors in semantic description and both of them encourage us pay attention to the mental experience, life knowledge in understanding semantic meanings. This thesis mainly adopts imagery as theory basis and creatively chooses prominence to illustrate the English ambiguous sentences. The third part is the most important part of this thesis which emphasizes on the study of the generation process and elimination mechanism of ambiguous sentences. In the generation process, it points out the produce process of ambiguous sentences in syntactic structure. In the elimination mechanism, it analyzes ambiguous sentences in detail by the two pairs of relationships: Profile/base,trajectory/landmark. Then the digestion methods mainly by the following three kinds in prominence: components, perspectives, and hypothesis. Each aspect combine with different kinds of ambiguous sentences and give them full explanations by divide them into different categories.Finally, the results of this thesis can be concluded in the following three aspects: Firstly, prominence makes out reasonable explanations for ambiguous sentences by various examples from the perspective of cognition. Secondly, prominence is the most suitable theory to eliminate English ambiguous sentences. Thirdly, the thesis verified that the elimination process of English ambiguous sentences is actually the combination process of people’s cognition and language competence.