Abstract—Ambiguity as a universal linguistic phenomenon is
concerned with every aspect of language, and it can be classified
into various types in different standards and perspectives.
According to the utterance motivations and effects, ambiguity
can be classified into intentional and unintentional ambiguity
belongs to pragmatic failure, which influences the normal
communication and needs to be disambiguated. Intentional
ambiguity is necessary for people to pay some special attention.
The research objective of the paper is intentional ambiguity and
the paper is going to research and analyze the positive function
of intentional ambiguity from advertising, literary works, daily
talks, political speeches, etc. The paper aims to state the positive
function of intentional ambiguity and then find out the potential
value of it in communication.
Index Terms—Ambiguity, intentional ambiguity, positive
function.
Liu Ying is with the School of Foreign Languages, Northwestern
Polytechnical University, China (e-mail: naomi1212@mail.nwpu.edu.cn).
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Cite: Liu Ying, "A Case Study on Positive Function of Intentional Ambiguity in English," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 5, no. 4, pp. 236-240, 2019.