An Exploratory Research On The Understanding Preference Of English Syntactic Ambiguity Among Chinese Non-English Major College Students

The application chances and frequencies of various interpretations of certain ambiguous structure are different. The interpretation with high application chance and frequency is more likely to be activated even without specific language environment. Therefore, understanding preference exists in people's processing of certain types of ambiguity. Scholars have done a lot of researches on the understanding preference of Chinese ambiguity and put forward many terminologies like Ambiguous Grade, Relative Ambiguous Grade and Difference Index of Preferred Frequency. However, few efforts have been made to explore the understanding preference of English ambiguity. On the basis of the researches on understanding preference of Chinese ambiguity, this essay attempts to make an exploratory research on seven types of English syntactic ambiguity to explore whether understanding preference exists in Chinese non-English major college students'processing of English syntactic ambiguity, which types of English syntactically ambiguous structures have obvious understanding preference and what are the factors that influence people's understanding preference.The author gave out test papers, counted the preferred times of each single item of the ambiguous sentences and calculated the Relative Ambiguous Grades and Difference Indexes of Preferred Frequency of all the ambiguous sentences. According to the standard Difference Index of Preferred Frequency≥0.5 and Relative Ambiguous Grade≤0.5, seven types of English syntactically ambiguous structures were classified into ambiguity with obvious understanding preference and those without obvious understanding preference. The investigation result reveals that obvious understanding preference exists in Chinese non-English major college students'processing of English syntactic ambiguity caused by multiple constituent, multiple syntactic functions, coordinate structure and ellipsis. However, no obvious understanding preference exists in Chinese non-English major college students'processing of English syntactic ambiguity caused by comparative structure, clauses and negation. In order to explore the factors that influence the understanding preference of the testees, the author interviewed 20 of them and classified the influencing factors into the two types: linguistic factors and non-linguistic factors. Linguistic factors include syntactic and semantic factors; non-linguistic factors contain background knowledge, psychological and recognition factors. The factors influencing understanding preference are multiple. However, for some specific ambiguous structures, there are one or more dominant factors that influence people's processing. These findings are identical to those of the researches on understanding preference of Chinese ambiguity.This research expands the research area of English ambiguity on the basis of the researches on understanding preference of Chinese ambiguity. The findings can be applied not only to improving the accuracy and speed of machine translation, but also to instructing English teaching and learning, the compiling of English dictionaries and so on.