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.