语言学歧义句.docVIP

⑺ambiguity—refers to the linguistic phenomena that constituents of the sentence have more than one lexical/grammatical interpretations. Eg,①We saw her duck. She has a duck/ she was ducking ②你在做什么？ What are you doing? / what is your job? 这个人谁也不认识？ Nobody knows this person. / this person knows nobody 她是去年生的小孩。She was the child born last year. / she gave birth to a baby last year. A. lexical ambiguity →refers to the ambiguity which is caused by the different interpretation of a certain word in a sentence. Eg, ①He is looking for glasses. He is looking for spectacles./ vessels made of glass used for drinking liquid ②She was seated by the general manager. She was offered a seat by the gentle man./ she was seated by the side of/ give a place ③The rest of the police is insufficient. The remaining police is / the relaxation The causes of lexical ambiguity are: polysemy The criminal lawyer is coming. The lawyer who committed crime/ defends for the criminal Mr. Smith is going to marry Jane at the church. homonymy The boy was attracted by the ball/ball. Show me your table./table. Desk/ chart differences between American English and British English eg, He lives on the second floor. B. grammatical ambiguity →which is caused by the different interpretation of the syntactic structure of the sentence. Eg, ①The fat manager`s wife is fond of pretty clothes. ②The policeman hit the man with a stick. ③She gave her baby pictures. →a)She gave some pictures to her baby. b) She gave her some pictures drawn for baby. c) She gave her some pictures of baby. d) She gave her some pictures drawn by baby. Some types of grammatical ambiguity 1) prepositional phrase eg, ① John wrote a poem on a tombstone. ②John telephoned Mary in hospital. 2)pronoun eg, ①John said to Bill that he had seen the woman before . ②The parents of the girls were ashamed of their conducts. 3)modal verbs eg. He may come into the room in five minutes. 4)attributive eg, ①He used to liv