A Chomskyan Approach To The Generative Mechanism Of English Structural Ambiguity

With reference to Chomsky's theoryα-movement, through which D-structure is moved to S-structure to turn out a written or spoken sentence. Structural ambiguity is penetrated into in a dynamic and generative way to seek for its root derivative reason and mechanism.There are almost no monographs on structural ambiguity and structural ambiguity is studied still by traditional grammar that only gives, for its own limitations, superficial explanations to S-structure of structural ambiguity. Some papers involves a generative approach to structural ambiguity, which is, however, sporadic and shallow because it is not concrete or penetrative only to derive that the difference between S-structure and D-structure is the reason for the appearance of ambiguity. .The distinctive feature of the study of structural ambiguity in this thesis is that structural ambiguity is dealt with dynamically in a generative way independent of linguistic environments.As is mentioned above, the structural ambiguity is studied in the process in which D-structure is moved, throughα-movement, into S-structure to generate a written or spoken sentence, and structural ambiguity is formed in the derivation of a sentence because the ambiguous structure is a part of a whole sentence.Besides, Chomsky's theories are innovatively applied to the study of structural ambiguity, and new proposals are bravely presented as follows.1. The trace theory inα-Movement only marks D-structure's position of a constituent in S-structure by the trace mark t. Actually, in the X-bar analysis of D-structures of structural ambiguity for penetrative study, in D-structure the S-structure's position of a moved-back constituent also needs to be marked. Thus e-trace is proposed in which italicized letter e is used, in D-structure, to mark the S-structure's position of a moved-back constituent.2. In the application of Chomsky's Government theory to Not-type ambiguity analysis, not is considered as the governor, the head that governs its complement. A new phrase, not phrase is proposed, in which not is the head of the phrase. It is thus concluded that the number of the respective complements the head not can govern determines the quantity of the ambiguities the not phrase can produce.3. Binding theory are creatively applied to the study of structural ambiguity. Based...