摘 要

英语，由于其丰富的词汇量和多样化的句法结构，存在有大量的歧义现象。尤其，中国大学生作为英语的二语习得学习者，来自母语的影响使他们更有可能在英语输出过程中制造歧义。尽管歧义也具有修辞等正面功能，但总体而言，歧义现象仍然阻碍了发出者和接受者之间语言信号传递的准确度，更有甚者，还会造成误解。

本文以武汉理工大学英语专业25名学生的94篇命题作文作为语料，摘选出其中的140句歧义句进行整理、分析和统计，归纳和说明了歧义产生的九大原因，通过统计得出大学生英语写作中造成歧义的“高频”原因，并就其解岐策略给出了简要分析和建议。基于这些研究，本文希望能为教师们的写作教学提供参考，并帮助学生理解和体会英语语言的全面性，认识其语言结构及运用规律，从而改善硬记语法、死背单词等传统的学习方法。

关键词：歧义；解岐；大学生英语写作；现象分析

Abstract

Owing to its abundant vocabulary and various syntactic structures, English has large pool of ambiguity. Especially, as second language learners, Chinese university students are more likely to produce ambiguity in English output because of influence from their mother tongue. Even though ambiguity can also play positive functions, by large, ambiguity still increases the difficulty of realizing the interpretation at the desired level of specificity, and even causes misunderstandings between signal senders and receivers.

In this paper, 94 EFL writings of college English majors in Wuhan University of Technology are collected, and 140 ambiguous sentences from them are picked out, analyzed and counted. The author attempts to classify the elements which trigger these ambiguities into 9 categories. All of the triggers are clarified, and through frequency comparing, the most frequent triggers are concluded. Then, the strategies of disambiguation are further discussed. These studies are made in hope to provide assistance for English writing teaching, and to help student understand English as a whole together with its structure and pattern, instead of learning in the traditional way of repeating words and grammar.

Key Words: ambiguity; disambiguiation; EFL writing of college students; phenomenon analysis

Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Literature Review 3

2.1 Definitions of Ambiguity 3

2.2 Classification of Ambiguity 3

3 Methods 5

3.1 Participants 5

3.2 Data Collection 5

4 Results 6

4.1 Ambiguity Caused by Multiple-eaning Morphemes 7

4.2 Ambiguity Caused by Transformation Words 8

4.3 Negative Ambiguity 8

4.4 Modality Ambiguity 9

4.5 Ambiguity Caused by Clause Elements 10

4.5.1 Adverbial Ambiguity 10

4.5.2 Attributive Ambiguity 12

4.6 Ambiguity Caused by Verb’s Tense and Aspect 13

4.7 Co-ordination Ambiguity 14

4.8 Dexis Ambiguity 15

5 Conclusions 17

5.1 Word-building Disambiguation 17

5.2 Grammatical Disambiguation 18

References 19

Acknowledgements 20

Appendix 21

Analysis of Ambiguity in EFL Writing of College Students

1 Introduction

Ambiguity is a universal linguistic phenomenon which exists in every language in the world. Owing to its large vocabulary pool and specificity of sentence structure, English is no exception. In most circumstances, ambiguity exists as a barrier which blocks the effective communications and discourses. And for many forms of application of language technology such as text retrieval and machine translation, ambiguity potentially triggers error. However, in certain applications like advertising and news reporting, ambiguity can also help to carry some potential information and realize rhetoric functions.

On account of ambiguity’s dual pragmatic significance, this phenomenon has already attracted considerate concerns from both domestic and foreign linguistic researchers. Trangott (1980) claimed that, “Creativity is a linguistic universal, that is a characteristic shared by all human languages. Ambiguity is another, and is of particular interest to linguists.” She also pointed out the reasons of formation of ambiguity as the fact that there is more than one meaning corresponding to most of each English word, and also as the multiple meaning of sentences, which “differs in this respect of mathematics”. Moreover, definition of ambiguity, classification of ambiguity and disambiguation strategies varies in different schools of research. For instance, Walton (1996) defined ambiguity to six types under three dimensions, while Herndon (1976) identified ambiguity in perspectives of deep structure and surface structure of sentences. Most importantly, there is obvious difference between the general methods of ambiguity analysis conducted by domestic and foreign researchers: in China, grammatical analysis limited in traditional linguistic field is the most typical research method, but in foreign academia, studying ambiguity in terms of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics, specifically, like from the mechanism of human brain and eye movements, is more common. Based on these distinctions, the summarization and comparison of the present researches is going to be mentioned in this paper.

In this paper, the author intends to probe into the ambiguity based on a corpus consists of EFL writings collected from 25 college English majors. Due to the interference of their first language, English language learners have more possibilities to generate ambiguity in their language output and neglect ambiguity among language input. Therefore, the research on causes of ambiguity appeared in their writings and the further discussion on how to disambiguate these ambiguities are expected to provide beneficial suggestions to both language teaching and English language learners. The quantitative analysis of reasons leading to ambiguity in this certain corpus helps discover the sensitive area of ambiguity formation, i.e., the most frequent reason occurs. In light of different systems of ambiguity classification, disambiguation strategy and method at corresponding levels can be further explored. On the other hand, the figurative use of ambiguity in this corpus will also be found. And thus, the phenomenon of intentional application of ambiguity in EFL writings can be analyzed. Accordingly, relevant teaching design might be affected by this research. Besides of this, analyzing ambiguity in English helps students improve their capabilities in understanding and applying English language. By learning ambiguity, students can be aware of the sense of learning English as integrity. As Nuhiu mentioned in papers, by clarifying the term of ambiguity itself if one is able to understand how complicated English can be. (Majlinda, 2015) A sentence which is written can be ambiguous owing to its lack of presentation of phonological features. A sentence which is grammatically correct can be ambiguous due to sooth semantic combinations. What is more, a sentence which is literally clear enough can lead to ambiguity as well, because the context in which it exists might be uncertain. In this consideration, learning ambiguity can help students learn English in accordance with language patterns, instead of inflexibly repeating grammar and words. Above all, the findings in this paper aim to promote the effective and efficient language output (in form of writing), and to avoid misunderstanding-oriented ambiguities continuing copied in following learners.

2 Literature Review

2.1 Definitions of Ambiguity

As for different researchers give different definitions of ambiguity, the classification of ambiguity also varies in accordance with these definitions.

According to the definition given in Longman Dictionary of Language Teaching and Applied Linguistics, ambiguity is “A word, phrase or sentence which has more than one meaning is said to be ambiguous”. (Richards, 2000) Although language itself is a firm symbol system, the correspondence between symbols with meanings is not exactly certain. (Wu, 2014) Therefore, ambiguity under this definition can be classified as three kinds—ambiguous words, ambiguous phrases and ambiguous sentences. Similarly, ambiguity can refer to these three kinds of elements which obey grammar and logic but produce more than one way of understanding. (Chen, 2013) Besides of this, Atkinson (1982) and his colleagues defined ambiguity into two categories. The first one is vocabulary ambiguity, which is “based on two or more meanings of a certain word”. And the other one is structural ambiguity, which is further illustrated as “different combinational relations among words”. And as for Leech (1981), he described ambiguity in terms of semantics as “A sentence that has two or more than two propositions”.

In 1996, Walton clarified ambiguity as three dimensions and six types. The first dimension—potential ambiguity, includes lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity and inflective ambiguity. The second, imaginary ambiguity, also can be further divided into emphatic ambiguity and suggestive ambiguity. The third and the last, actual ambiguity, also called pragmatic ambiguity.

2.2 Classification of Ambiguity

According to different definitions of ambiguity, the classification varies as well. For one way, ambiguity is considered by three factors: the phonetic factors, the lexical factors and the structural factors. (Liu, 2013) In this paper, the theoretical framework of classifying ambiguities is referred from English Ambiguity written by Qiu Shude. Before talking about ambiguity classification, a fact is worthy noticing—ambiguity which is discussed in this paper is distinguished from another term “error”. These two terms are commonly confused in some studies. However, error are specifically wrong word choice or structure mistakes caused by personal ignorance, while ambiguity happens on the basis of infinite of lingual applications. Sometimes, errors may lead to ambiguity as well. For example, Lee finds that referential ambiguity exists when wrong subject-verb agreement happens. (Eun-Kyung, 2015) The whole process of ambiguity’s triggering, exposure, elimination and application are all linked with the nature of language structure, and also cannot be separated from its externally determinative factor—contexts. (Wang, 2013)

The two kinds of element affecting language structure are internal elements (including word building factor, phonetic factor, semantic factor and grammatical factor) and external element (which is mainly pragmatic factor). (Qiu, 1998) Coincidently or not, these two elements also trigger and eliminate ambiguity. Therefore, ambiguity in English can be classified into ambiguity caused by internal elements and ambiguity caused by external elements. And furthermore, the former kind of ambiguity can be subdivided into word-building ambiguity, phonetic ambiguity, semantic ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity.

3 Methods

3.1 Participants

The participants of this study are 25 sophomore English majors in Wuhan University of Technology. 21 of them are females and the others 4 students are males. These participants get English writing lessons in the same classroom settings. In class, they were assigned to write draft about two topics.

3.2 Data Collection

The data set in this paper consists of 100 EFL writings written by 25 English majors in Wuhan University of Technology. Their writing prompts were as follows: 1. Grades (marks) encourage students to learn. Do you agree or disagree with this statement? Use specific reasons and examples to support your opinion. 2. Children should only play sports for fun rather than play sports in competitions or contests. Most of the writings include two drafts. The first draft was completed in class within 30 minutes with length requirement of three paragraphs (around 200 words). Then the teacher graded the first draft and students submitted the second drafts (length requirement: five paragraphs, around 500 words).

To mark the ambiguity origins more conveniently, all of the 100 drafts are numbered in one format: the whole corpus is sub-divided into two parts (A and B), each is composed by 50 drafts of No.1 or No.2 issue. All of the first draft is post-numbered as “-a”, while the second draft as “-b”. For example, A1a refers to the first draft of the first student in corpus A. In this way, the drafts numbered as 13a, 15a, 18a in the first sub-corpus and 3a, 7a, 9a in the second one are missing. Therefore, the actual total of this corpus is 94.