ABSTRACT
The present chapter deals with three ambiguous book titles from contemporary, best-selling literature: Enduring Love (1997) and The Children Act (2014) by Ian McEwan and The Sense of an Ending (2011) by Julian Barnes. Because these titles allow for distinct linguistic analyses, I briefly review several variants of ambiguity and vagueness, restricting myself to the phenomena that are relevant here, and relate this review to recent discussions about the (non)avoidance of ambiguity in everyday language (see the first section: ‘Semantic Indeterminacy in Natural Language’). The main part of the chapter is devoted to the previously mentioned novels: I analyze them both from a linguistic point of view and with respect to the narrative itself (see the second section: ‘Strategic Deployment of Ambiguity: Novel Titles’). The concluding remarks summarize the results in view of a Gricean approach to ambiguity.
