A Contrastive Study Of Syntactic Ambiguity In English And Chinese Ane Its Implications For Foreign Language Teaching

Ambiguity is a pervasive feature of language, and universal feature of languages. But every coin has two sides. So does language. Besides the general characteristics, each language has its specific characteristics. Since different languages possess different structures (phonetic, lexical, and grammatical) and different nations have different language habits and modes of thinking, there inevitably exist different types of ambiguity in different languages. Therefore, we find it highly necessary to make a contrastive study of ambiguity among them.This thesis aims at a contrastive study of syntactic ambiguity in English and Chinese through observing and analyzing it. We hope to find out the similarities and peculiarities in syntactic ambiguity between these two languages, and its implications to foreign language teaching.The thesis is developed simply at a linguistic level. Through the contrastive study, we find that syntactic ambiguity exists extensively in both languages, and there are similarities as well as peculiarities. The ambiguities caused by unclear modifying relationships are common phenomena in both English and Chinese, but they exist relatively more in English than in Chinese. Their similarities also include ambiguity caused by different scale of cohesion in coordinated structures; by different scopes and focus of negation and by different functions of verbs. The peculiarities of English lie in: ambiguity caused by post modifications; unclear modification of post prepositional phrases and ellipsis in comparative clauses. And in Chinese ambiguity caused by VO / VOC structures is its peculiarity.Based on the contrastive study of syntactic ambiguity, the thesis combines it with foreign language teaching. In accordance with the syntactic ambiguity which can be easily found in students'reading, writing, translation and communication, effective methods are suggested to eliminate the ambiguities. They include changing the word order; using the other words or phrases; rewriting the sentence; adding ellipsis parts and offering proper context. Helping students to adopt strategies of disambiguation is very important to improve their abilities of listening, speaking, reading, writing and translating.Negative ambiguity should be avoided. On the other hand, intentional ambiguity can create a special rhetorical effect or achieve a certain goal. Therefore, helping students to realize positive aspects of ambiguity can guide them to appreciate literary works so as to promote their abilities of reading and writing and make their language vivid and appealing as well.The contrastive study of syntactic ambiguity in this thesis offers important implications to foreign language teaching. Students should be helped to follow the law of language to study. Since there are a lot of varieties and contradictions inside the language structure itself, we should have an overall and dialectical view on it rather than put too much emphasis on teaching grammar alone.