HOW AMBIGUOUS IS THE STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY

HOW AMBIGUOUS IS THE STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY

1. Group ambiguity into two, lexical and structural ambiguity,

   • Hurford and Hesley (1983:128)

2. Categorizes ambiguity into three levels: lexical ambiguity, surface structure ambiguity and deep or underlying structure ambiguity.

   • Kess (1992:133)

3. Cruse (1986:66)

   • Pure syntactic ambiguity, quasi-syntactic ambiguity, Lexico-syntactic ambiguity, and pure lexical ambiguity.

4. When a sentence has more than one reading, it is called ambiguous

5. the meaning of the component words can be combined in more than one way (O’Grady et al. 1997)

6. Some of which are multiple meaning, lack of information, and, incompleteness (Owen and Sweeney in Visser 2004:1)

7. In each case, the explanations include the types of structural forms, the reasons of ambiguity, and some possible ways to resolve them.

8. Types of Structural Ambiguity

   • Type 1: VP + NP + PP (prepositional phrase)
     • The girl hit the boy with a book.
   • Type 2: Gerund + VP
     • Visiting relatives can be boring
   • Type 3: VP + NP + more … than + NP
     • Jerry loves the fans more than Sally.
   • Type 4: VP + NP + PP1 + PP2
     • Put the bottle on the table in the kitchen.
   • Type 5: NP + Adj. Clause
     • The teacher thanked the students who had given her some flowers.