Cantos by Ericka Koehler

Ambiguity is a word or statement that has more than one meaning. If a phrase is ambiguous, it means multiple things (“Ambiguity,” 2021). There are different types of ambiguity like lexical and syntactic ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity is a word that has more than a meaning and syntactic ambiguity is a clause or phrase that has more than one meaning because it has more than one syntactic structure (Denham & Lobeck, 2012). Also, there is narrative ambiguity which refers to a story or idea that has different meanings. The distinction is not made clear by the writer (“Ambiguity,” 2021).

An example is the tale “Black Cat” by Edgar Allan Poe. This tale was published in 1843 in the U.S. Saturday Evening Post. The story is a horror story. It is about a black cat and his owner who suffered from drinking problems just as Poe did in real life. The whole story is ambiguous, if you reread it, you can interpret it as a sane narrator telling people about supernatural things happening or as an insane narrator telling his hallucinations. There is a lot of symbolism in the tale too. The black cat symbolizes bad fortune in many cultures, but it can also have the opposite meaning in others, as in ancient Egypt where it was worshiped.

The following is an example of ambiguity:

            “The cat followed me down the steep

              stairs, and, nearly throwing me headlong,

              exasperated me to madness.”

In that sentence, we can understand that the cat followed him until he tripped and fell headlong and this drove him to madness. Another way to read this sentence is that he was tired of the cat. Depending on what exactly the author wants to communicate to the reader, the sentence can be clarified.

Modifications can be made to the wording. For example, you could say: “The cat chased him so much that the man fell, hit his head, and went crazy from a brain injury.” This would clarify that the cat’s actions at that moment caused his madness.

  References

Ambiguity (2021). Poem Analysis. Retrieved from:

https://poemanalysis.com/glossary/ambiguity/

Denham, Kristin & Lobeck, Anne (2012). Linguistics for Everyone: An Introduction. 2nd edition.