Ambiguity and Its Pragmatic Functions英语歧义及其实用功能赵 宣Abstract: Ambiguity has traditionally been regarded as a kind of language misuse, which, however, is a quite limited view of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not good-for-nothing. Instead, it can play an active role in helping people to achieve positive communication effects. In this thesis, the author first introduces Wu Qianguangs classification of ambiguity and then explores the functions of ambiguity, especially the pragmatic functions of ambiguity, which can be summarized as follows: avoiding conflict, achieving politeness and realizing purpose, etc. Key words: ambiguity; pragmatic functions; meaning1. IntroductionAs a feature of language, ambiguity arises when a word, phrase, or sentence has more than one meaning. As far as ambiguity is concerned, it is always associated with wrong or bad language use mainly due to the speakers or writers ignorance or negligence. For a long time, there has been a common belief among people that good language use involves clarity and should not contain any ambiguity. Deemster has said that “Communication does not always require absolute clarity: partial understanding is often enough for making inferences that a hearer is most interested in“ (1996: 204). So not only in oral communication, but also in other language uses such as in literary works, attentive and sensitive people will find that ambiguity is not worthless or good-for-nothing. This thesis is going to explore ambiguity from the perspective of pragmatics. The ultimate purpose of the thesis is to study the functions of ambiguity. 2. The classification of ambiguityScholars abroad and at home have put forward many ways of classifying ambiguity. The significance of making a classification lies in the fact that it can help people understand how ambiguity is caused. This paper intends to apply the Chinese scholar Wu Qianguangs classification. He puts forward two ways of classifying ambiguity. One includes lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity; the other includes phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, and grammatical ambiguity. (伍谦光，1994) 2.1 Phonological ambiguityPhonological ambiguity is mainly caused by homonymy, variation of stress and tone, liaison, etc. Such kind of ambiguity often appears in spoken language and disappears in written form or it appears in written form and disappears when spoken out. Homonymy is a common phenomenon in both English. Flower/ flour and heir/ air are some examples. Ambiguity caused by stress change can be shown in the phrase “a green house: a house whose color is green” when the stress is put on the word “house“ and “a green-house: a special house designed for the growth of flowers” when the stress is on “green“. As for ambiguity resulting from liaison, “grey day“ and “Grade A“, “a nice man” and “an ice man“ are some cases in point.2.2 Lexical ambiguityLexical ambiguity is mostly related with polysemy and homophones. For example, in sentence “The damage was done by the river”, by can mean “beside” or “through the agency, means, or instrumentality of”. So this sentence may mean either “The damage was done beside the river” or “The river brought about the damage.” “Pass the port” is a more ambiguous sentence, because there are two polysemous words: pass may mean “go across”, or “give by hand”; port has the meaning “harbor” or “a kind of wine.” Hence the sentence can mean: “(The ship) went across the harbor,” or “Please hand me the wine.” Only the actual situation can decide the meaning of such ambiguous sentences. 2.3 Grammatical ambiguityAnother type is grammatical ambiguity arising from the grammatical analysis of a sentence or a phrase. For example, the phrase young men and women can be analyzed either as “young/men and women/” (i.e. both are young.) or “/young men/ and women” (i.e. only the men are young.) Another example is “He left the room unwashed“ where “unwashed“ is ambiguous in that it can be a complement to “the room“ or to “he“. The whole sentence may mean: he did not do some washing to the room; or he left without taking a bath. 3. The functions of ambiguityIn the scientific fields that require and worship accuracy, ambiguity has always been identified as the main obstacle for various natural language processing tasks. In such cases, it is justifiable to regard ambiguity as something negative, which should be avoided as far as one can. When it comes to some other occasions such as daily communication and literary works, however, ambiguity is not always so undesirable as people usually think. Instead, ambiguity also has its positive aspect, which mainly lies in its pragmatic functions. 3.1 Ambiguity and rhetoricIt is widely acknowledged and recognized that ambiguity can be used to achieve unexpected rhetoric effects. Most of the traditional studies of ambiguity focus on its relations with rhetoric. So the paper will first explore the relations between ambiguity and rhetorical devices, such as metaphor, pun and irony