Paralogism, Ambiguity and Circumlocution: Do Compensation Strategies Help?

As one of the main functions of spoken language is transference of information, it is essential that interlocutors in the conversations be able to express what they really want without any ambiguity. Hence, the present study intends to investigate why and to what extent people use different kinds of paralogisms or false argumentations and paralogistic sentences and how the ambiguities in peoples’ utterances can be removed by using compensation strategies as circumlocution to prevent misunderstanding. To this end, 30 Iranian EFL students with the age range of 18 to 26 took a related Discourse Completion Test. The collected data were analyzed using Statistical Package for the Social Science (SPSS, Version 21). The findings revealed that there are some intentional and unintentional reasons for using paralogistic words and sentences to mislead people. Furthermore, the results showed that people use different strategies and categories of circumlocution (Salazar, 2006) to solve communication problems, with some more frequently used. This study has various implications for language practitioners and applied linguists.