A Contrastive Study On Ambiguity In Chinese And Thai Language

As a common characteristic in natural language, ambiguityphenomenon is universal. However, except for this kind of languageuniversality, at the same time, there are some distinct characteristics indifferent languages. Generally, every language has its typical languagestructure including phonetics, lexicon and syntax, besides, differentnationality has different language codes and thinkingmodes.Therefore,ambiguity phenomenon in different languages is also ofgreat deal of diversity. Through the comparison between Chinese andThai language, it is found that there exists a lot of lexical ambiguity inboth these two languages varying from the ambiguity caused byhomophones,homonyms,polyphonic words, and polysemy,whereas,thereis of great commonality of these two languages in the ambiguity causedby homomorphic word and morpheme as well as homomorphic word andphrase;as for the ambiguity caused by multifunction of word, Chineselanguage is a little less than Thai language. In the aspect of structuralambiguity, for the kind of ambiguity with different hierarchicalsegmentation and same grammatical relation, Chinese language and Thailanguage both have the ambiguity forms of modifier-head relation,predicative-object relation and subject-predicate relation;for the kind ofambiguity with same hierarchical segmentation and different grammaticalrelation,there are lots of such ambiguity relations and great similarity inboth Chinese and Thai language assubject-predicate-combination,subject-predicate-apposition,subject-predicate-modifier-head,subject-predicate-predicative-complement,subject-predicate-predicative-object,predicative-object-apposition,predicative-object-modifier-head, while the ambiguity of predicative-object-combinationand modifier-head-combination relation just exits in Chinese language;for the kind of ambiguity with different hierarchical segmentation and different grammatical relation, it seems that both in Chinese and Thailanguage a great deal of ambiguity occurs in the forms ofmodifier-head-combination,predicative-object-subject-predicate,predicative-object-predicative+double object and combination-apposition.Moreover,in the kind ofmodifier-head-predicative-object ambiguity, there exists large differencebetween Chinese and Thai language, which occurs in the form ofattribute+modifier and modifier+adverbial respectively, on the other hand,there are no such kind of modifier-head-preposition-object andmodifier-head-subject-predicate ambiguity in Thai language. About thesemantic ambiguity comparison between Chinese and Thai language, thecommon ambiguity forms in these two languages lie in the unclearness ofsemantic relations, semantic orientation, semantic features and reference;meanwhile, the ambiguity caused by the negation scope just exists inChinese language. As a result, this thesis based on the analysis ofambiguity causes in Chinese and Thai language, put forward somesuggestions and methods to eliminate ambiguity phenomenon,and alsodiscusses the application of ambuilty from three aspects.