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The Structural and lexical ambiguity found in Cleo Magazine Advertisements

This study is done to find the kinds of sentences or phrases which
are structurally ambiguous and kinds of words are lexically ambiguous. The
writer wants to know what the advertisements are ambiguous. She knows
that ambiguity can occur in any situation, not only in advertisements.
Because of that, she wants to analyze the words/ sentences that can be
ambiguous in advertisements. In this study, the writer finds the structural
and lexical ambiguity of advertisements in Cleo Magazine. The writer uses
the data in this study from advertisements in Cleo Magazine issued in April
and March 2006. The data for this research is taken from 40 advertisements
from two editions and the writer uses 15 advertisements from two editions.
The kinds of advertisements that are used in this study are about several
products used by women that occur in Cleo Magazine. The writer applies
the theory of structural and lexical ambiguity from Hurford and Heasley?s
theory (1984). She also uses the theory of syntactic structures by Adrian
Akmajian (1995) and Nelson Francis (1954). The writer finds the ambiguity
in the advertisements by those theories and also finds the meanings from the
dictionary. This study uses a descriptive qualitative approach. In analyzing
the data, the writer identifies the structurally ambiguous sentences by using
Tree Diagrams or IC Analysis. She also clarifies the lexically ambiguous
sentences by looking at the meaning from the lexical ambiguous words.
Moreover, she finds the kinds of ambiguous sentences and the kinds of
ambiguous words that occur in advertisement. There are five structural
ambiguities including three declaratives sentences, one adjective phrase and
one noun phrase. There are also 10 lexical ambiguities that are included in
the advertisements; there are four nouns, two verbs, three adjectives and one
adverb. Finally, the writer finds that lexical ambiguity occur more
frequently than structural ambiguity of advertisements in Cleo Magazine