Ad
related to: examples of ambiguity in english literature
Search results
Results From The WOW.Com Content Network
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. An ambiguity is represented as a puzzle to Empson. We have ambiguity when "alternative views might be taken without sheer misreading." Empson reads poetry as an exploration of conflicts within the author.
In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool. Groucho Marx's classic joke depends on a grammatical ambiguity for its humor, for example: "Last night I shot an elephant in my pajamas. How he got in my pajamas, I'll never know". An additional example of ambiguous humor comes from Shakespeare's Othello:
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 ...
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 ...
However, this prohibition has been questioned; more descriptivist authors consider that a dangling participle is only problematic when there is actual ambiguity. One of Follett's examples is "Leaping to the saddle, his horse bolted", [5] but a reader is unlikely to be genuinely confused and think that the horse was leaping into a saddle rather ...
Lexical ambiguity is a subtype of semantic ambiguity where a word or morpheme is ambiguous. When a lexical ambiguity results from a single word having two senses, it is called polysemy . For instance, the English "foot" is polysemous since in general it refers to the base of an object, but can refer more specifically to the foot of a person or ...
Equivocation in a syllogism (a chain of reasoning) produces a fallacy of four terms (quaternio terminorum).Below is an example: Since only man [human] is rational. And no woman is a man [male].
The sentence "time flies like an arrow" is in fact often used to illustrate syntactic ambiguity. [1] Modern English speakers understand the sentence to unambiguously mean "Time passes fast, as fast as an arrow travels". But the sentence is syntactically ambiguous and alternatively could be interpreted as meaning, for example: [2]