“How did you hurt your face?” Asked my concerned coworker.
“I hit my car,” was my matter-of-fact reply. Their looks of consternation made me realize that I had hit upon lexical ambiguity as well.
You see, lexical ambiguity is the linguistic property of a sentence containing more than one meaning. Puns are, arguably, the most well known form of lexical ambiguity.
Continue reading “Double Meaning Wacks & Smacks”
Language, though shared by a group of people, is also unique to each individual. A word’s sound may have a personal feeling to someone different from the shared speaker’s connotation and or denotation.
(Metacognition Flash: Isn’t it interesting that humans have feelings about the words that we use to express feeling?!)
Linguists and poets have noticed this subjective association of pleasantness, or lack thereof, surrounding a word regardless of its meaning, and this has lead to a subbranch of linguistics called phonaesthetics.
Continue reading “Sounds Beautiful”