Implicature and Ambiguity in “The Road Not Taken”

Abstract

Robert Frosts The Road Not Taken is a classic example of poetic language leveraging pragmatic mechanisms to create more meanings than what is literally expressed This research explores the working of conversational implicatures and semantic ambiguities in the poem using a closereading methodology supported by a systematic pragmatic annotation schema Every line was checked for Gricean maxim flouts Quality Quantity Relation Manner enrichment examples generalized vs particularized and cancellations were tagged on a custom tag set Interrater reliability was above Cohens 80 and triangulation with Frosts letters and early criticism provided validity Analytic procedures entailed tracing each maxim violation back to its ensuing implicature and inventorying lexical structural and narrative ambiguities to disclose how they make possible alternative reader inferences of agency regret and selfjustification The findings show that around sixty percent of the lines in the poem have marked pragmatic flouts that create alternations between nonconformity and retrospective rationalization that directly address the current research objective of describing how Frosts ambiguities influence interpretations of choice and regret In conclusion the research verifies that Frosts strategic underdescription and temporal framing are an aesthetic strategy that transforms reader engagement into a dynamic inferential process