Overview

Structural Ambiguity in English is a major new scholarly work that provides an innovative and accessible linguistic description of those features of the language that can be exploited to generate structural ambiguities.   Most ambiguity scholarship is concerned with disambiguation—the process of making what is ambiguous clear. This book takes the opposite approach as it focuses on describing the features in the English language that may contribute towards the creation of structural ambiguities, which form the core of some of the best word-plays found in advertising, comedy and marketing. Oaks utilizes a systematic and comprehensive inventory approach that identifies individual elements in the language and their distinctive behaviors that can be manipulated in the deliberate creation of structural ambiguities. In doing so he also provides authentic examples to illustrate the concepts he presents. This book will appeal to researchers and academics interested in the structure of the English language, usage, pragmatics, communication, natural language processing, editing, and humor studies as well as those in marketing, advertising, or humor writing.

Full Product Details

Author:   Dallin D. Oaks
Publisher:   Bloomsbury Publishing PLC
Imprint:   Continuum International Publishing Group Ltd.
Dimensions:   Width: 15.60cm , Height: 3.00cm , Length: 23.40cm
Weight:   0.956kg
ISBN:  

9781847064158

ISBN 10:   1847064159
Pages:   576
Publication Date:   27 May 2010
Audience:   College/higher education ,  Postgraduate, Research & Scholarly
Format:   Hardback
Publisher's Status:   Active
Availability:   In Print  
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Language:   English

Table of Contents

Volume I Part I: Preliminary Considerations Preface 1. Introduction 2. Pragmatics and Structural Ambiguity 3. Phonological Influences on Structural Ambiguity 4. Auxiliary Verbs and Clause Types 5. Inventory of Affixes, Contractions, and Morphological Processes Part II: The Lexical Inventory ---Form Classes 6. Inventory of Nouns 7. Inventory of Verbs, Part I: Transitive Verbs 8. Inventory of Verbs, Part II: Additional Verbs 9. Inventory of Adjectives and Adverbs Volume II Part III: The Lexical Inventory---Structure Classes 10. Inventory of Pronouns 11. Inventory of Prepositions 12. Inventory of Conjunctions Part IV: Scope and Modification 13. Inventory of Prenominal Modifiers 14. Inventory of Other Modification and Scope Ambiguities Part V: Other Syntactic Considerations 15. Ellipsis 16. Questions and Indirect Reported Speech 17. Fixed Expressions Conclusion 18. Conclusion and Formulas Appendices Index

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Author Information

Dallin D. Oaks is Associate Professor of English Linguistics at Brigham Young University, USA.

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