an analysis of the causes of ambiguity of english vocabulary

1、An Analysis of the Causes of Ambiguity of English vocabularyAbstract: Ambiguity in English is a common phenomenon; it is very complicated for a variety of reasons. There’s no doubt that it is often used by us in our dail

2、y life, this paper's intention is to analyze how ambiguity may have its origins in lexis, and the basic means to avoid it. So as to help us to avoid possible misunderstanding caused by ambiguity in communication.Key

3、words: ambiguity, lexis, eliminate1. IntroductionIn order to analyze the causes of the ambiguity of English vocabulary, we should understand what ambiguity is. When you are reading, you may find some sentences that can e

4、xplain into two or more meanings according to different locale, and these sentences are called the ambiguous sentences. Kess, F. J. Hoppe, A. R.1966)For a word, ambiguity typically refers to an unclear choice between di

5、fferent definitions as may be found in a dictionary. A sentence may be ambiguous due to different ways of parsing the same sequence of words. For example: the watch ran fast. Weather it is “be fast” or “runs quickly”? It

6、’s hard to judge. We can see that ambiguity in English is a very common phenomenon; we had better avoid it to reach better communication.2. Lexical AmbiguityThe lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase consists in its havin

7、g more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. “Meaning“ hereby refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary. Almost every word in a dictionary is ambiguous in the sense that is almost a

8、lways has several different definitions.(趙元任.2006:655) According to it, lexical ambiguity can be divided into four situations: the causes of the polysemy or homonym; the causes of the change of meaning; the causes of the

9、 different uses between American and British English; the causes of the change of the word’s morphology.2.4 The causes of ambiguity of the change of the word’s morphologyThe morphology of English is represented by variou

10、s forms, such as compounding, affixation, reduplication, morpheme internal changes and supplication and so on. Sometimes the different understanding of the word’s morphology may cause ambiguity. (陳新仁.2007:48)Take the wor

11、d “unlockable” as an example. The word “unlockable” is a compound word, and compounding refers to a word-formation process in which words are formed by putting two or more words together. The new word thus is called a co

12、mpound word, or simply a compound.(王東波.2007:136) So when the prefix un- combined with an adjective, a new adjective created, it means “not”. So in that case, the word unlockable refers to “not able to be locked”; when th

13、e prefix un- combined with a verb, a new verb created, it means “to do the reverse of”. And under that circumstance, the word unlockable refers to “able to be unlocked”.It is really easy for these compounding words to ca

14、use ambiguity, others like unnamable, unnumbered, and unlearned as well. In order to obtain the accuracy of language, we must be careful to use these words.3. The elimination of lexical ambiguityIn speaking or writing ar

15、ticles, we should avoid words that may arise from ambiguity, in order to eliminate it, we can add the qualifier or replaced it with the other word. For instance, the word “record” in the sentence “Bill broke the record”

16、may cause ambiguity. To eliminate it, we can add the word “music” or “world” before “record”. Another example, the sentence “He is drawing a cart at the moment.” may cause ambiguity by the word “drawing”. So we can use a

17、nother word “pulling” to replace “drawing” to eliminate the ambiguity.4. ConclusionIn this paper, I analyzed the causes of ambiguity of English vocabulary and put forward the basic methods to eliminate ambiguity. As we a

18、ll know, the academic studies on language ambiguity has lasted a long time, because the research of ambiguity is not only has a positive significance on verbal communication, but also plays an important role in promoting