Strategies of Ambiguity

There has been a growing awareness that ambiguity is not just a necessary evil of the language system resulting, for instance, from its need for economy or, by contrast, a blessing that allows writers to involve readers in endless games of assigning meaning to a literary text. The present volume contributes to overcoming this alternative by focusing on strategies of ambiguity (and the strategic avoidance of ambiguity) both at the production and the reception end of communication. The authors examine ways in which speakers and hearers may use ambiguous words, structures, references, and situations to pursue communicative ends. For example, the question is asked what it actually means when a listener strategically perceives ambiguity, which may happen both synchronically (e.g. in conversations) as well as diachronically (e.g. when strategically ambiguating biblical texts in order to make them applicable to moral lessons). Another example is the question of whether ambiguity awareness increases the strategic use of ambiguity in prosody. Moreover, the authors enquire not only into the effects of ambiguous meanings but also into the strategic use of ambiguity as such, for example, as a response to censorship or as a means of provoking irritation. This volume brings together several contributions from linguistics, literary studies, rhetoric, psychology, and theology, and it aims to provide a systematic approach to the strategic production and perception of ambiguity in a variety of texts and contexts.

The Open Access version of this book, available at http: //www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license.

Matthias Bauer is Professor of English Philology at Eberhard Karls University Tübingen. His fields of research include Early Modern English Literature (with an emphasis on Metaphysical Poetry), 19th-century English Literature (with an emphasis on Dickens), the language of literature, and literature and religion. He was the chair of the Research Training Group 1808 ＂Ambiguity: Production and Perception＂ and co-chairs several further research projects on interpretability in context and reading competence as well as co-creativity in Early Modern English Literature. He is the co-founder and editor of Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate and co-editor of Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch.

Angelika Zirker is Associate Professor of English Literatures and Cultures at Tübingen, Germany. After completing her PhD on the Lewis Carroll’s Alice-books (The Pilgrim as Child: Play, Language, and Salvation) in 2010, her second book titled William Shakespeare and John Donne: Stages of the Soul in Early Modern English Poetry was published in 2019 with Manchester UP. Her research interests include nineteenth century literature, with a special focus on Charles Dickens, as well as early modern poetry and drama. She is involved in various interdisciplinary research projects, and she is the co-editor of two journals, Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch and Connotations: A Journal for Critical Debate.