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The second edition (revised) was published by Chatto & Windus, London, 1947, and there was another revised edition in 1953. The first printing in America was by New Directions in 1947. Seven Types of Ambiguity ushered in New Criticism in the United States. The book is a guide to a style of literary criticism practiced by Empson.
Lexical ambiguity can be addressed by algorithmic methods that automatically associate the appropriate meaning with a word in context, a task referred to as word-sense disambiguation. The use of multi-defined words requires the author or speaker to clarify their context, and sometimes elaborate on their specific intended meaning (in which case ...
The higher the number of synonyms a word has, the higher the degree of ambiguity. [1] Like other kinds of ambiguity, semantic ambiguities are often clarified by context or by prosody. One's comprehension of a sentence in which a semantically ambiguous word is used is strongly influenced by the general structure of the sentence. [2]
Empson's best-known work is the book Seven Types of Ambiguity, which, together with Some Versions of Pastoral and The Structure of Complex Words, mines the astonishing riches of linguistic ambiguity in English poetic literature. Empson's studies unearth layer upon layer of irony, suggestion and argumentation in various literary works, applying ...
In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word or expression in multiple senses within an argument. [1] [2] It is a type of ambiguity that stems from a phrase having two or more distinct meanings, not from the grammar or structure of the sentence. [1]
The scholar of English literature Steve Walker states that Tolkien's prose leaves ample freedom for the reader through its ceaseless ambiguity in many dimensions, such as in diction, [2] in balancing psychological reality against "imaginative possibility", [3] in description of characters and landscape, [3] in tone, [5] between past and present ...
The meaning of the word is imprecise or open to more than one interpretation. For example, in "the Sun is bright", 'bright' is a relative term that does nothing to inform the reader of how bright the Sun actually is, nor how bright it is compared to other celestial bodies. Editors should always avoid using terms such as these, except in quotations.
Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...