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A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement whose intended meaning cannot be definitively resolved, according to a rule or process with a finite number of steps. (The prefix ambi - reflects the idea of "two", as in "two meanings"). The concept of ambiguity is generally contrasted with vagueness.
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 and was a key foundation work in the formation of the New Criticism school. [ 1] The book is organized around seven types of ambiguity that Empson finds in the poetry ...
Equivocation. In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument. [ 1][ 2] It is a type of ambiguity that stems from a phrase having two or more distinct meanings, not from the grammar or structure of the ...
An archer about to loose an arrow. A fruit fly on a banana peel. " Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana " is a humorous saying that is used in linguistics as an example of a garden path sentence or syntactic ambiguity, and in word play as an example of punning, double entendre, and antanaclasis .
The novel is narrated by seven different characters whose lives intersect in various ways. The first of these, Alex Klima, is a Czech psychiatrist who has been hired to treat Simon for his depression. Simon is obsessed with his ex-lover Anna, and it is this obsession that leads him in a downward spiral. He takes a child from school but the ...
The Lord of the Rings, book 2, ch. 7 "The Mirror of Galadriel" [T 2] The scholar of English literature Steve Walker states that Tolkien's prose leaves ample freedom for the reader through its ceaseless ambiguity in many dimensions, such as in diction, in balancing psychological reality against "imaginative possibility", in description of characters and landscape, in tone, between past and ...
Syntactic ambiguity, also known as structural ambiguity, [ 1] amphiboly, or amphibology, is characterized by the potential for a sentence to yield multiple interpretations due to its ambiguous syntax. This form of ambiguity is not derived from the varied meanings of individual words but rather from the relationships among words and clauses ...
New Criticism. New Criticism was a formalist movement in literary theory that dominated American literary criticism in the middle decades of the 20th century. It emphasized close reading, particularly of poetry, to discover how a work of literature functioned as a self-contained, self-referential aesthetic object.