Examining ambiguities in film titles: the Nigerian situation

Abstract

The paper investigated ambiguous film titles with specific reference to films in Nigeria. It observed that film titles which are meant to serve as initial appraisal and forerunners of films that light up the interest of the consumers and promote patronage are usually scripted in mind-boggling ambiguous expressions, which make them prone to multiple interpretations. Using the pragma-syntactic theoretical framework, a total of ten ambiguous film titles randomly selected across the length and breadth of Nigeria were analysed. The analysis showed the possible interpretations of each of the selected titles, their related syntactic structures and the usefulness of pragmatics in interpreting film titles. The paper finally recommended that pragmatic features and discourse primes such as inference, implicature, linguistic context among others should always be taken into account before any film title is interpreted.

Keywords: Pragmatics, syntax, ambiguity, inference, implicature, illocutionary and context