Please take a moment to complete this survey below
Library's collection Library's IT development CancelIn arranging the words into sentences, written language uses more
complex grammar than spoken language; therefore, in a sentence, a word or a
phrase sometimes is placed defectively so that it can modify any one of two (or
more) different constituents. However, each modification can provide different
meanings so that the sentence can be interpreted more than once. In printed media
such as magazine, this structural ambiguity can later on confuse the readers.
Therefore, the writer would like to investigate syntactic ambiguity. From this
study, the writer wanted to know what kinds of syntactic ambiguities that
potentially occurred in the Interview?s article and how they were resolved. This
study used the qualitative descriptive approach. In collecting data, the writer took
nine Interview articles of the English Tempo magazine which were written by
Indonesian writers. Moreover, in analyzing the data, she used the main theory of
Transformational Grammar (Radford, 1988) which was applied in tree diagram.
Through the findings, the writer found sixteen potentially structurally ambiguous
phrases when they were observed separately from the context. There would be one
or more than two ambiguities in each article. The potentially ambiguous phrases
were Noun phrase, Prepositional phrase, and Verb phrases in term of negative
scope ambiguity. Thus, in order to understand the actual meaning of the
ambiguous phrases, they supposedly had to be put into the context of the
sentences. However, if the ambiguous phrases were taken separately from its
context, we could still resolve the ambiguity by adding the hyphen (?) or the
preposition (of) between the head and the modifier.