Nor is the profound nature of the enterprise itself. What he means by this-he mentions grammatical order, psychological complexity, and degree of awareness of the ambiguity as three scales pertinent for understanding what he means-is not, even with the scales, clear. In practice, that might be the case, but in theory, they reveal something about the nature of what Empson is about, beneath the brilliance of individual analyses.Įarly on he explains that the types increase in logical disorder. It has been said that it too difficult, and not all that important, to keep track of the different categories. The seven types of ambiguity, Empson tells us, are as follows: first, when words can have several possible meanings contributing to a single meaning second, when a phrase has two meanings that can be resolved or subsumed under a single whole third, when a word possesses two divergent senses, fracturing the meaning of a phrase or line (as with puns) fourth, when two different meanings are possible, but not resolvable into a unity, and so present a fractured state of mind fifth, when an author has worked only part way through a metaphor or simile, and is discovering an idea in the act of writing, so that the simile or metaphor looks in two directions at once within a unit of language, and is suspended between them sixth, when an author presents a tautology or contradiction, which then must be worked out by a reader supplying additional terms, which may introduce a conflict into the reading seventh, when one of a word’s meanings is entirely opposed to another, showing a fundamental division in an author’s mind, which the text holds in order. William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity is an acknowledged classic of literary criticism, but it is also among the most difficult to approach and appreciate as a whole, as a coherent statement of intellectual intent, and not just as a bundle of brilliant analyses.

Empson ambiguity