摘要

语言是交流的工具，是人们表达思想感情的手段和方法。在交际的各种场合中，经常会碰到一些语义模棱两可的句子，我们称之为“歧义”。语言歧义几乎在所有语言系统中都普遍存在，英语这一使用最为普遍、在全球分布最广的语言也不例外。歧义常常影响人们进行准确的表达,因此对语言歧义现象的研究就显得格外重要。此外，研究歧义对语言的理解、写作、翻译等都有着重要的意义。本篇论文就英语歧义在语音、词汇、语法三方面产生的歧义现象进行一定研究，同时系统地介绍消除歧义的方法。希望本篇论文能帮助大家更好地理解歧义现象，并在使用语言的过程中避免语言歧义的错误。

关键词：歧义；语音；词汇；语法；消歧

Abstract

Language is a communication tool which can be employed to express people’s minds and feelings. In all kinds of communication situations, people often meet with some double-meaning sentences and we call them “ambiguous sentences”. Ambiguity is commonly seen in all language systems and there is even no exception for English. Probing deep into language ambiguity is very important and necessary since language ambiguity hinders exact expression. What is more, studies on the language ambiguity are significant in comprehension, writing and translation. Hence, this paper is to list the ambiguity at various levels, i.e., the phonetic ambiguity, the lexical ambiguity and the grammatical ambiguity; and introduce some methods of disambiguation.

Key words: ambiguity; phonetic level; lexical level; grammatical level; disambiguation

1.Introduction

Ambiguity is a very important and common phenomenon in language. Just as the Danish linguist Jesperson holds that ambiguity is the inherent feature of any natural language. (quoted in Duan Chunyan, 2010:1) The previous studies on language ambiguity have a long history which can dates back to the ancient European country. And then, many scholars had been devoted to studying its cause, its characteristics, its applications and so on. So this is not a new topic, but it is still worth time and efforts to probe deep into it since there are so many misunderstandings happening everyday due to the language ambiguity. And what is more, studies on disambiguation are far from enough to work out some efficient ways to avoid ambiguity in our daily life. So it is of great value to have a complete discussion on this topic. This paper aims to deal with ambiguity from three parts: phonetic ambiguity, lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity.