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Seven Types of Ambiguity is a work of literary criticism by William Empson which was first published in 1930. It was one of the most influential critical works of the 20th century [citation needed] and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. [1]
Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement, or resolution is not explicitly defined, ... In literature and rhetoric, ambiguity can be a useful tool ...
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 ...
Tolkien's ambiguity, in his Middle-earth fiction, in his literary analysis of fantasy, and in his personal statements about his fantasy, has attracted the attention of critics, who have drawn conflicting conclusions about his intentions and the quality of his work, and of scholars, who have examined the nature of that ambiguity.
In linguistics, psychology, and literary theory, the concepts of deictic field and deictic shift are sometimes deployed in the study of narrative media. These terms provide a theoretical framework for helping literary analysts to conceptualize the ways in which readers redirect their attention away from their immediate surroundings as they become immersed in the reality generated by the text.
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 ...
Reification is part of normal usage of natural language, as well as of literature, where a reified abstraction is intended as a figure of speech, and actually understood as such. But the use of reification in logical reasoning or rhetoric is misleading and usually regarded as a fallacy. [3]
Another example of an ambiguous sentence is, "I went to the bank." This is an example of lexical ambiguity, as the word bank can either be in reference to a place where money is kept, or the edge of a river. To understand what the speaker is truly saying, it is a matter of context, which is why it is pragmatically ambiguous as well. [15]