Download CHAPTER2 REVIF W RELATED LITERATURE This chapter !s

CHAPTER2
REVIF W
RELATED LITERATURE
This chapter !s devoted to literature review of u'le theory about ambiguity, especially
structural ambiguity, constituent analysis, and the t:-ee diagrams of structure constituents.
the experts to add some explanations and
writer will quote some references
examples that are useful in supporting the theory.
Ambiguity
we know a word, we should know how i'. is pronounced and
meanmgs.
However, not all words have only one sound and one meaning. Sometimes, words that
have the same prorat<'1ciations could lllive different
meanings. It also happens
in
sente:Jces. One sentence can have r.10re than one meaning, which can be considered as
fui
ambiguous sentence. Hence, it ma.l<es listeners &c'1d readers become confused with the
correct meaning of words that a'.'e pronounced and the sentences that are ·written.
According to Fromkin & Rodman (1983:
j69), a word or a sentence is ambiguous if it
can be understood or interpreted in mere Lh&> one way. For example: The sentence "She
canno!
children". It may be understood to mea'1 "She is unable to give birth to
children" or "She carmot tolerate children". The a.-nbiguity is because there are two
won:s bear with two different meanings. There are two types of ambiguity, i.e. lexical
ambiguity a'1d structural ambiguity.
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2.1
The first type of a.rnbigui!y is Iexical ambiguity. It happens in a word, not
m a sentence. Accordi:lg to Hurford & Heasley
(1994.· 128). notes that any
ambiguity resu:ting from the 2-!nbiguity of a word is a LEXICAL AMBIGUITY.
Additionally, in accordance with Fromkin & Rodman (1983: 169), sentences
may be ambigu::ms because they contab one or more a.rnbi![UOUS words. This is
"How is bread made?"
know that!" Alice cried eagerly. "You take some flour
"
"Where do you pick the flower?" the Whi:e Queen asked. "In a garden, or
the hedges?"
"Well, it isn't picked at all," Alice explained: "if s ground "
"How many acres of ground?'' said t:.1e White Queen.
The humor of this passage is based on two sets of homonyms: flower and
flour <md
:wo meanings of ground. Alice means ground as the past tense of
grind, while the W11ite Queen is ir.terpreting ground to mean "earth." Thus,
lexical ambiguity is an ambigaity of one or more words in sentences.
The second type
ambiguity is structura1 ambiguity, which is centered
a sentence. As this thesis focuses on structural ambiguity, the writer will give
much more explanations about it instead of
lexical ambiguity. Snuctural
ambiguity is an ambiguity of the structure of a sentence which causes the
tnear.ing of the sentence ca.'"! be interpreted in more than one way. An exa_rnple of
structural ambiguity is noted by Akmajian. Demers, Farmer. & Harnish
(1998:140-141):
"'
The mother of the boy and he girl will arrive soon.
TI1is sentence is ambiguous; that is, it has more than one meaning. It is
either about one person (the mother) or about two people (the mother in addition
to the girl). That sentence should be grouped in two different ways:
a. The mother (of the boy and
b.
girl) will arrive soon.
(The mother of the boy) and the girl v.@ arrive soon.
When of the boy and the gM are grouped together as in (a), the sentence
is interpreted to mean that only the mother will
When of the boy is instead
grouped with the mother, as in (b), the sentence is interpreted to mean that both
the mother and girl will arr:ve. Thus, depending on how the words are grouped
(how they are structu:ed), one interpretation ather than the other is possible.
The other exatnple of structural ambiguity from Finegan (1999: 151):
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•
He sold the car to his brother in l\ew York.
Th:s stri;1g of words is ambiguous. That is, it has more than one possible
ir.terpretation. In the sentence above, the ambiguity arises not from the individual
words (which are ail unambiguous) but from the fact that the string of words has
two
possible constituent structures. We can
bracket that sentence in different
ways to indicate the differe:Jt constituent structures:
" He sold the car [to [his brother in New York]].
2. He sold the car [to his brother] [in New York].
The first sentence mea.'ls that it
\Vas to
brother in New York that he
sold the car. Meanwhile, the second sentence means that it was in New York that
he sold the car to his brother.
addition, according to 0'Grady, Aronoff,' Archibald, & Rees-Miller
(2001:
263),
some
sentences
are
structurally
ambiguous in
that
their
component words can be combined in more than one way. An exan1ple of
str:1ctural ambiguity in a sentence:
•
Nicole saw the people with binoculars.
Jn one interpretatim; of that sentence, the people had binoculars when
Nicole noticed them (the phrase with binoculars modified the noun people),
while in the other interpretatioE, Nicole saw rhe people by using the binoculars
(the PP modifies the verb).
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Beside thaalong with Fromkin & Rodman (1983: 172), sentences that
the structures
more than one interp:-emtion, rather than the words
the
sentences are structurlllly ambiguous. Some examples of structural ambiguity:
a) They hated the shooting of the hunters
b)
horse is ready to ride.
c) JoiL11 saw
walking to the store this morning.
d) The English history teacher is having her tea.
In a) our knowledge of linguistic stmcture pennits us to interpret the
sentence as referring to hlLJ.ters as shooters or as being shot. In b) the horse itself
that is ready to ride or the horse that is ready to ride by someone. In c) either
John or JoacJ. who is walking to the store; that is John is riding a car and saw Joan
is walking to the store or John who is walking to the store, saw Joan. In d) either
the teacher of English history or the history teacher who is English tl:!at is having
her tea.
Constituent Structure
According to Wekker & Haegeman (2000.· 5), synmctic analysis may be defined
as: dete1mining the relevant component parts of a sentence and describing these parts
grrur"'11atically.
The component pa1is of a sentence are called constituents. In other
words, syntax involves the two closely related tasks of: breaking down the sentence into
its constituents and assigning some grammatical label to each constituent, stating what
type of constituent (or g!'llmmatical category) it is,
what grammatical function it
ha. Constituent are like building blocks which pattern in certain ways to form larger and
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the largest unit
larger
the sentence. The
are called constituents and the
hierarchical of larger units in a sentence is cai!ed constituent structure. Each constituent
smallest) can be broken down into its component parts.
(except
The purpose of
doing syntactc ar_a!ysis is to discover the ways in which constituents combine to fom1
the structure of sentences. 1l!er.efc;re, in the analysis of the constituent structure of a
semence, it is important to break sentences down into their various constituents and
establish the form classes. The most common way used to indicate what type of
constituent or to represent the constitaent structure of sentences is labelled bracketing;
however there is another way, i.e. a tree diagram.
2.3.
.Diagrams
In order to demonstrate
struct-:.tral ambiguity that occurs in each sentence, the
tree diagram will be used to help the writer indicate structural constituent of each
sentence. Tree diagram is a notational device which
is entirely equivalent to labelled
bracket£ng1 although it looks different, it provides the same information about the
syntactic structure of a sentence. According to Akmajian, Demers, Farmer, & Harnish
(I 998:!57), there are at least three important aspects of sentence structure!
a. The linear order of words in a sentence
b. The categorization of words into parts of speech
c.
The grouping of werds inio structural constituents of the sentence
(phrases)
three types of structm·al information can be encoded into what is called a
tree diagram (or phrase marker) of the sort illustration in tree Ll. Co2sider the structure
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in tree 1. 1. Such tree diagrams can at first seem quite complicated. But in fact they
represent a simple and straightforward way of the three kinds of structural information
sumna:rized above.
Tree
s
VP
Aux
NP
\
/
\
\l
pp
N
Art
I
people
m
Art!\
)\ I
Art
the
I
N
room
p
!
\
I
move
the
'
)\
I I
A."':
I
I
will
pp
NP
\
D
A
The
v
.I
desk
into
N
the hall
Symbols uses: S - se,.'1tence; NP --noun phrase; Aux- auxiliary verb; VP- ver:.,
phrase; ?P
Tree
prepositional phrase, Art - article; N
1.: represents
noun; V - verb; P - preposition.
the st.1.1cture of the sentence The people in the room will
move the desk into the hall.
components of a constituent
structure tree are nodes
and br 'lches. Branches are the lines that are connecting to the nodes. In nodes, there is
important dominance among nodes. For example, PP immed;ately dominates P and NP;
it means that PP is
morher node and P and NP are rhe daughter nodes. In other
words, t.'le mother nodes dominate
daughter nodes. The mother is called immediate
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dominance because the mother nodes dorr:inate the daughter nodes. On the other hand,
the daughter node is knovm as immediate constituent. The mother nodes and the
daughter >odes ate connected with the bra::tches.
p
PP
P
= mother
NP
=
node
daugh er nodes
/ =branches
2.3J. Tree Diagnm1s
Structural Ambiguity
diagram ca'1 be used to show L'le significant differences of the
structure of the same sentence. So that, te ambiguous pati of a sentence can be
seen. According to Akmajian. Demers, Farmer, & Harnish (1998:169-170), tree
diagrams can 'Je
exan:ple above
e
to explain other itnportant linguistic phenomena. As in one
2.1.2:
The motheof the boy and the girl will arrive soon.
It is an ambiguous sen+ence, that it has more than one phrase marker (tree
diagram),
'Which
c!ul
be fommlated as trees 1.2 and 1
In tree 1.2 the head
"noun" of the subject, mother, is modified by a prepositional phrase that has a
conjoined noun phrase in it: of the boy and the girl. In tree 1.3, on the other hand,
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the subject noun phrase is itseif a conjoined noun phrase: the mother of rhe boy
followed by the girl.
Tree 1.2
Au.x
NP
Vf'
I
I
I
I
Art
I
p::>
N
I
I
'\
I
'
\
I
\
------------ ---- --
The
mother
of the boy and the girl
will
D
arrive soon
Tree L3
s
Aux
The mother of the boy and
the girl
wiil
VP
arnve soon
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A system
represe:1tation using phrase markers (tree diagrams) allows
us to account for structurally ambiguous sentence by assigning more than one
rhrase marker to each ambiguous sentence.
2.4.
of Speech and Phrase
The lay out cf tree diagra_ms shows the reader's feeling and understartding about
the structure relations betv.;een constituent in a sentence. In order to make accurate tree
diagrams, one needs a reasonable knowledge about
parts
of speech and phrases.
TI:erefore, the writer gives a brief explanation about these two items:
Part of Speech
To be proficient in a v.Titer language, we have to be able to put words
together in
<L'l appropriate
sequence to form sentences to express our thought.
order to combine words into a sentence con·ectly, we have to know about pa_rt of
speech. Accord!ng to Stageberg & Oaks (2000) and Azar (1989), there are five
pa:-ts of speech in English, i.e. nou.;1., verb, adjective, adverb, and preposition.
1. Nouns
Not:ns are identified as nouns by two aspects of form, their inflectional
morphemes (the noun plural {-s pl} and the noun possessive {-s ps} and
their derivational morphemes. For exan1ple: The author seems tired.
Amhor is a noun because it can be changed to i::'le plural in the same
position. It ':Jecomes The authors seem tired.
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2. Verbs
Verbs have a max1mnm of tive different forms: base form or stem,
present third
- person singular, present participle, past tense, and past
participle. Any word that has three or more of these forms is said to
belong to the form class called the verb. For example: cut has the
mi'1imum of three forms
cut, cuts, c:.:tting; depart has four forms
depart, depans, departing, <Lrtd departed
3.
Adjective
A word that is inflected with -er and -est and that is capable of forming
adverbs with -ly and/ or nouns with
-ness is called an adjective. For
example: close is an adjective because it can form close, closest, closely,
and closeness. Furthem10re, adJective is also a word that describes nouns
or modifies nouns. It gives a little different meaning to a noun. For
examples: iazy (adjective)
student (noun),
intelligent student, good
student.
4. Adverb
The adverb l,as four suffixes to set it apart from other fonn classes -- the
derivational suffixes -ly, -wise,
ward, and-sand the free form like. For
examples: fortur1ateiy, clockwise, northward, n!ghts, and
sn::dentlike.
Moreover, adverb is a word that modiiies verbs. it answers the question
"How?" For examples: quickly, well, quietly. Jt is also used to modifY
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adjective. For example: I am extremely (adverb) happy (adjective). It is
used
to
express
time
or
frequen y.
Examples:
tomorrow,
today,
yesterday, never, soon, usually, always, yet.
5. P epositions
Prepositior:s are words like of in, and to that are usually followed by a
noun, noun phrase, personal pronoun, or noun - substitute, which are
called the ob3ect
1.he prepositions. For examples: George sat between
the two deans, George jumpeC. on it, George went from this to that.
2:.4.2. Pluase
Phrase is a group of words which forms part of a sentence. According to
Aarls & Aarts (1982), a phrase is a constituent which can be identified on tlJ.e
basis of the word class membership of at least one of its constituent words.
Beside that, in accordance wieh Todd
(1987), phrc.se is a group of words
fbnctioning as a unit. There are five commonly types of phrase in English:
I. A noun phrase is a group of words with a noun as its headword. There
can be up to three noun phrases in a simple sentence, as the underline
units in the foHovring simple sentence show:
The voung nlfu1threw 1;]:le old dgg a bon 0.
Ihat rich rpan will build his eldest daughter a fine hol1Se.
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2.
An adjective phrase
is a group of words which modifies a noun. Like
adjectives, these words can be either attributive (that is, usually preceding
but occasionally tollowing a noun):
The child, laughing happiiv, ran out of the house.
That utterly i'ascinating novel has been banned.
or predicative (t'lat is, following a verb):
3. A verb phrase is a group of words with a verb as headword. Verb phrases
car: be either tbite:
or non- finite:
A simple sentence can have only one finite verb phrase:
But a complex sentence may have several finite verb phrases"
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When he was invited to give a lecture, he wa Jgid that all reasonable
expenses would be reh.mdeg.
An adverb phrase is a group of words which functions like an adverb; it
often plays the role of te!Eng us when, where, why or how an event
occurred:
We are expecting him to come next year.
He alm_pst alwavs arrives on time.
5. A preposition phrase is a group of words that begins with a preposition:
Do you know lha:man with the scar?
We are Qn very good te1ms.