TYPES OF AMBIGUITY: TRANSFORMATIONAL GRAMMAR APPROACH WHY AND HOW TO RESOLVE

Abstract

A Word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. The ambiguity, however, can be noticed if one really has a linguistic knowledge of how to analyze the phrase or sentence. Of the three kinds of ambiguity - lexical, constructional (structural) and derivational ambiguity. Structural ambiguity occurs when a phrase or sentence has more than one underlying structure, such as ‘old men and women’, ‘old’ can refer to only men or both men and women. The phrase can be disambiguited by puting it in a sentence with some sort of formal signals which help the reader or hearer to recognize the sentence structure (Taha, 1983 : 169). Some of the signals include function words, inflections, affixes, stress, juncture and punctuation as in ‘The old men and women talked about the president election’. The three types of ambiguity that the writer wants to explore in this paper are lexical, constructional (structural) and derivational ambiguity. The rest of this paper also discusses and ambiguity such as: (1) identify test, (2) independent sense relations, (3) homonymy and polysemy. In this paper, the writer also explores the causes of ambiguity (Polysemy).