A Corpus-based Analysis Of English Ambiguity In College English Writings

Being featured with arbitrariness, duality and creativity, human language is so complicated and flexible, so unstrained by the immediate context and so capable of creating new meanings that it is so distinctive from the languages used by other species. Due to the abundance of vocabulary and the particularity of sentence structure, ambiguity always exists in human languages, which hinders the smooth communication between the signal sender and its receiver, and even causes misunderstandings. English is no exception. This common but complicated phenomenon has always been of great interest to linguists and a great amount of fruitful research has been done in this field. There is no doubt that the study on ambiguity is not only essential and practical to language comprehension, writing and translation, but also greatly promotes the development of theoretical linguistics. Based on previous theories and research in this field, it's known that ambiguity is generally divided into three categories and they are phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity. In this thesis, 400 after-class compositions of 63 sophomore English majors from Huazhong University of Science and Technology were collected to form a corpus. Then the author extracts those ambiguous sentences from the corpus and divides them into different categories accordingly. Through analysis and classification of ambiguity in this corpus, certain factors have been detected for causing those ambiguous sentences, such as homonymous or polysemous words, different binding scopes, different information focuses, etc. In written English, these factors generally fall into two categories, which are lexical ambiguity and syntactic ambiguity. While at the meantime, lexical ambiguity is mainly caused by polysemy, and syntactic ambiguity mainly results from the complicated and unclear relationships among sentence levels. Upon analysis and comparison, several sensitive areas where ambiguity more likely occurs are found, such as unclear attributives, unclear adverbial modifiers, modal verbs, the conjunction word and, etc. Later, several methods for disambiguation, such as the selective modal, exhaustive modal, minimal attachment strategy and late closure strategy, are discussed in the hope that proper guidance will be offered to detect and decrease ambiguity in English learning, thus enhancing college students'overall reading and writing ability.