An Analysis of the Causes of Ambiguity from Relevance Theory
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Pragmatic ambiguity is a pervasive phenomenon in communication. However, our daily communication is seldom hindered by ambiguous sentences, which suggests ambiguity is depressed and the principle of Relevance Theory is of great enlightenments for us to study ambiguity.
1 Relevance Theory111
In 1986, Dan Sperber and Deirdre Wilson propose the Relevance Theory. Being closely connected with communication and Cognition, Relevance Theory aroused great discussion. In 2001, they brought the second edition of Relevance: Communication and Cognition to light, this edition defines Relevance as: an assumption is relevant in a context if and only if it has some contextual effect in that context. That means relevance is the relationship between the assumption and a series of contextual presuppositions. The preceding utterance and the subsequent utterance in communication are interrelated to some degree. The implied meaning of utterance originates from the combination of new information and the context. The more the contextual effect is, the more the relevance will be. Yet, contextual effects do not come free; people have to make mental efforts to get them. Consequently, the more the efforts are, the lower the relevance will be. Thus, they further improve the definition of relevance by two extent conditions, namely, an assumption is relevant in a context to the extent that its contextual effects in this context are large and the effort required to process it is small.
The Theory holds that the understanding of utterances is a cognitive process involving ostentation and inference, or the ostensive-inferential process. The communicator gives ostension, while the addressee draws inference from what the communicator says. The communicator's ostensive stimulus, according to the principle of relevance, can ensure its own optimal relevance, whereas the hearer's inference is a deduction of the communicator's communication intention combined with the context, on the basis of the hypotheses that the speaker's ostensive stimulus has optimal relevance.
According to Relevance Theory, in verbal communication any communicator's meaning consists of explicit content, context and implicit content. Sperber and Wilson propose that "the principle of relevance are intended to explain ostensive communication as a whole, both explicature and implicature. The communicator's meaning, namely, explicature and implicature by the sentence is sometimes found to be inconsistent with the literal meaning. Thus, the utterance is ambiguous with two possible meanings.
2.1 Deficiency of Ostention
According to the communicative principle of Relevance, communication is an ostensive-inferential act. Ostention refers to the intention manifested to the hearer by the speaker. It is necessary to depend on context to understand an utterance with various meanings. But sometimes for the utterance without ostention, the hearer cannot make inference to precisely understand its meaning. This kind of deficiency is mainly characterized in the deficiency of shared knowledge and cultural knowledge, thus, ambiguity usually is resulted from the two factors.
2.2 Different Context
Context can be defined as the amount of surrounding text needed in order to understand a particular word or longer piece of language. Just as Unman points out, most of this kind of ambiguity can be clarified by involving the context or intonation for spoken language. Thus, context is of great importance in figuring out ambiguities in spoken or written language. However, it is a dynamic concept, which is to be understood as continually changing, enabling the speaker and the hearer to achieve the goal of communication. It is about understanding what things are communicated; it also enables us to make appropriate presuppositions and inferences, provides us with the true pragmatic meaning of utterances and allows the communication to be carried on smoothly.
Even if people pay enough attention to context, most of them classify this kind of context as concrete situational context, neglecting cognitive context in people's mind; therefore, it is different for people to interpret the cognitive process of ambiguity. Because cognitive environment is different, the same utterance has different pragmatic meaning in different contexts. In order to understand the sentence "she went to the bank" for example, we need to know whether the text is describing a need for cash or a fishing expedition, since bank has meanings which can apply in either context. According to Firth and his context theory, meaning can never be fully understood without context and it is found in context. For the understanding of ambiguous sentences, with the help of relevance theory, context is also indispensable.
2.3 Different Intentions
For the hearer, to recognize the intention behind the ostention is necessary for efficient information processing: hearer who fails to recognize this intention may fail to notice relevant information, thus ambiguity will also occur. In other words, there exists a mismatch or a gap between the speaker's intended meaning and the hearer's interpreted meaning.
The analyses above are the main reasons of ambiguity according to Relevance Theory.
3 Summary
By analyzing the causes of ambiguities from the Relevance Theory, we could understand discourses better and improve our output abilities, such as English writing skill. Besides, it is helpful to eliminate ambiguity from pragmatic perspective.
References
[1] Sperber, D. & D. Wilson. Relevance: Communication and cognition [M]. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995.
[2] Kempson, R. M. Ambiguity and Word Meaning. Studies in English Linguistics, Longman Group Ltd, 1980.
[3] 王学信. 论英语歧义句的产生[J]. 安徽文学：评论研究，2007.
[4] 张晓红. 英语歧义中一些问题的看法[J]. 海南大学学报，2008.
第一作者简介： 董天，华北电力大学（保定）外国语学院，教授；
第二作者简介： 张建敏（1986-），女，河北邯郸人，华北电力大学（保定）外国语学院硕士研究生,研究方向：英语语言学。