Ambiguity as a Lnguistic and Rhetorical Strategy

Ambiguity as a linguistic and rhetorical strategy can take a variety of forms, as Empson shows in Seven Types of Ambiguity. It is important to recognize that Empson's study does not necessarily exhaust the subject of linguistic ambiguity; he identifies seven types but does not insist that they are the only seven types of ambiguity that can be identified. As he says, he told his reader that "the distinctions between the Seven Types which he was asked to study would not be worth the attention of a profounder thinker." But Empson also says that he believes that all great poetry "is supposed to be ambiguous." If poetry is the highest and best use of the language, then all best uses of the language are also embedded with ambiguity. That decisively links linguistic ambiguity with deliberation and communication, as well as with metaphor, symbolism, irony, paradox ("Text is always paradoxical," says Barthes ), figures of speech, rhetoric--even aesthetics in general. It is important to recognize ambiguity as a multidimensional instrument embedded in linguistic production that is operationalized in a way that makes the latent content of language function according to its author's intent, even though (or exactly because) that content may (or seem to) be concealed by the manifest form the language takes. Indeed, the richness of context for ambiguity means that ambiguity cannot avoid touching metaphysics and moral philosophy.

How purposive linguistic ambiguity operates is linked with r

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