威廉·燕卜荪:从朦胧到复杂

William Empson: From Ambiguity to Complex Words

燕卜荪是20世纪一位具有原创意识和自我更新能力的文学批评家。从《朦胧的七种类型》到《复杂词的结构》,燕卜荪对英国文学文本中大量词语及其意义的生成和演变进行了从内涵到外延、从语义到语境的挖掘和研究。本文着重考察和梳理燕卜荪对"含混"和"复杂词"及其内在机制形成的界定和探讨,分析"浓缩教义"如何使得词语背负复杂的文化形态和社会关系,从而导致词语意义的生成、变化和沉淀。文章还对对燕卜荪的"复杂词"和威廉斯的"关键词"进行对比,以期揭示二者之间的独立取向和共同目标,最后得出燕卜荪是一位文化语义批评家的结论。

William Empson is a critic of originality and self-renovation. Following his most celebrated work Seven Types of Ambiguity,he published The Structure of Complex Words,in which he examined further the generation and transformation of the meaning of words in English literature. This paper studies Empson’s definition of "ambiguity" and "complex words",and the formation of their internal structures.It analyses how "doctrines" are compacted behind the words with cultural and social patterns and relations that affect the formation and change of meanings. It also makes a comparative study between Empson’s "complex words" and Raymond Williams’ s "keywords" in an attempt to reveal their respective peculiarities and commonality. The paper concludes that Empson is a critic of cultural semantics.