A Comparative Analysis Of Ambiguity In The Chinese And English Nominal Groups Caused By The Endocentric Structure From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Linguistics

The nominal group is a crucial ingredient in both Chinese and English,and the endocentric nominal group is similar in the two languages,revealing a relationship between head and modifications.However,this kind of relationship is not always clear,which is easy to cause ambiguity.Ambiguity is inevitable in language usage.A word,phrase,or sentence with more than one meaning is said to be ambiguous,and ambiguity is classified into two types: lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity,also known as structural ambiguity.The current research on ambiguity can be divided into the following aspects: ambiguity phenomenon,ambiguity types,ambiguity structure,ambiguity resolution,etc.While the study of ambiguity in Chinese and English has been a longstanding problem,few studies concentrate on comparing or contrasting ambiguity in the Chinese and English nominal groups caused by endocentric structure from the perspective of Systemic Functional linguistics.Therefore,this study focuses on the ambiguity in Chinese and English nominal groups caused by the endocentric structure to explore the ambiguity caused by those different modified relations.Therefore,this thesis attempts to analyze ambiguity in the Chinese and English nominal groups caused by endocentric structure from the perspective of Systemic Functional Linguistics,and classifies this kind ambiguity.The thesis enumerates some typical examples concerning this ambiguity in Chinses and English and gives a new classification to this kind of ambiguity with the Cardiff Grammar:(1)ambiguity between a nominal group and a clause;(2)ambiguity within a nominal group;(3)ambiguity within a multi-level structure.The three types of ambiguity are further divided according to the internal units or elements within the Cardiff Grammar,which can report the structural reason for ambiguity.With this classification,the reasons that cause each type of ambiguity are dug out.Except for the influence of polysemy which belongs to semantics,the cause of this ambiguity in the nominal group is structural factors: structural hierarchy and structural relation.Through the cross-lingual comparison of the ambiguity in the Chinese and English nominal groups caused by endocentric structure,this study explains this grammatical phenomenon with the help of the internal rules of syntax.From this point of view,this study relies on the internal explanation of Typology.Meanwhile,because the Cardiff Grammar is one of the largest grammars existing in computational form,this research provides the possibility for the application of the Cardiff Grammar to the natural language process,which may help improve the accuracy of machine translation,further facing ambiguity caused by the endocentric structure.