A Semantic-Syntactic Study of Ambiguity in Humorous Contexts

Abstract

Ambiguity occurs when the sentence comprises of more than one single meaning. Ambiguity is of two kinds: lexical ambiguity in which a single vocabulary has more than on meaning and syntactic ambiguity when the syntactic structure of a sentence is ambiguous. Context has a great role in determining whether the sentence can be interpreted and become ambiguous. Ambiguity usually resulting in dilemma and it became a subject matter in many linguistic studies especially semantics. This study examines ambiguity that creates humors in which the data were collected in from resources in forms of newspaper headlines, puzzles, jokes and narratives. The data collected includes 25 cases of ambiguity; (12) statements concerning lexical ambiguity and the rest are syntactic ambiguity. The result shows that lexical and syntactic ambiguity are major apparatus used to create puns in humor. The results also suggest that ambiguity
is a vital source of humor when it involves double interpretations in which one interpretation suggests the actual meaning and the other interpretation suggests a humorous one which is not normally occurred in normal context.