Onymische Ambiguität in der Literatur
Onymic ambiguity in the literature

Summary/Abstract: Ambiguity is a key concept in modern poetics. Though there exist different concepts of literary ambiguity, I prefer to adhere to William Empson’s classical definition according to which any verbal nuance allowing alternative reactions to the same piece of language may be regarded as ambiguous. This paper not only intends to show that ambiguity can also extend to literary names, but it tries to differentiate between various kinds of onymic ambiguity in literary texts and asks what we may learn from poetonymic ambiguity about the mental processing of proper names.

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