With the development of pragmatics, some scholars began to study ambiguity from the pragmatic perspective。 The pragmatic ambiguity study puts the study into real communication situation and takes factors of both speakers and listeners into consideration。 Taking speakers’ intention and speaking effects into account, we can classify ambiguity into two categories, that is, intentional ambiguity and unintentional ambiguity。 For example,

A wife saw her husband lying at the bottom of the stairs and exclaimed, so she asked:

“Did you miss a step, dear?”

“No,” groaned the husband, “I hit every one of them。”

In the dialogue, intentional ambiguity can be found。 The wife asked her husband whether he missed a step of the staircase and then had an accident。 But the husband chose to play a joke to make himself not that embarrassed in a humorous self-mockery way。 So he said that he hit or, say, bumped against every step of the staircase i。e。 he fell down the stairs and that’s the reason why he lying at the bottom of the stairs and groaned with pain。 The husband obviously understood what the wife meant, but he deliberately took the discourse of his wife as an ambiguous sentence and interpreted it as he didn’t hit one of the stairs i。e。 miss a step。 

Sometimes the speakers have the intention to provide information, but they use some ambiguous expressions without realization。 Such kind of ambiguity is unintentional。 According to the results or effects caused by unintentional ambiguity, we can subpide it into two categories: negative unintentional ambiguity and positive unintentional ambiguity。 The former one may leads to communication failure while the latter one often makes people burst into laughter。 For example,来,自,优.尔:论;文*网www.chuibin.com +QQ752018766-

Teacher: “What’s an abstract noun, Jane?”

Jane: “I don’t know, Madam。”

Teacher: “What? You don’t know? Well, it is the name of a thing that you can think of, but you can’t touch。 Now, give me an example。”

Jane: “A red-hot poker。”

In this dialogue, the teacher tries to explain what an abstract noun is in an indirect way so as to elicit the student Jane’s answer。 However, Jane takes the literal meaning of teacher’s words and gives an answer that is quite unexpected and hilarious。