ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS For the completion of this graduation thesis, I have been fortunate to receive invaluable contributions from many people. First of all, I especially would like to express my deepest thanks to my supervisor, Mrs. Vo Thi Hong Minh, MA, whose useful instructions and advice, as well as detailed critical comments help me a great deal from the beginning to the end of the thesis writing process. Without her help, the study would have never finished. I also should like to thank the teachers in Foreign Language Department at Vinh University who have given me useful advice and favourable conditions for the completion of the study. Additionally, I am grateful to all students in class K48B2 English at Vinh University who have help me to carry out the survey for my thesis. Last but not least, I am in debt to my beloved family and my dedicated friends who are always by my side with their constant help and spiritual support during my studying process. I have made great efforts to complete the study. However, due to my limited knowledge, the study is far from being perfect. Thus, the author would like to receive any comments from the teachers, friends, and those who are concerned about this area, which can help improve the study. Vinh, May, 2011 Vo Thi Kim Oanh i ABSTRACT The importance of understanding English expressions and sentences, as well as the whole text in order to translate them into Vietnamese correctly has stimulated the author in the study on ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution. In this thesis, the author discusses different definitions of ambiguity, ellipsis and substitution and their types first. Then, the survey is implemented so as to investigate the main types of ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution. From the result, some suggestions for making disambiguation are given. In addition, some types of exercises are also given to practice. ii TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS . ABSTRACT . TABLE OF CONTENTS iii PART I: INTRODUCTION 1. Justification of the Study Nowadays English has become popular in all aspects such as: education, economy, politics, science, ect. In Vietnam it is one of the most important and compulsory subjects at all levels of learning and teaching. In recent years, together with the increasing need for learners, great efforts have been made in order to improve the quality of English teaching and learning. Vocabulary and grammar which seem to be the most important things in language system have attracted the attention of a large number of researchers. The author herself is really fond of studying the use of words as well as grammar structures. Moreover, since the Vietnamese and English languages have very district grammar systems, Vietnamese learners of English tend to encounter a lot of difficulties in their acquisition of the target language. One of these difficulties is ambiguity caused by the usage of words and sentence structures. This makes learners at all levels, from elementary to university or even at higher levels, difficult to understand and to interpret English into Vietnamese and vice verse. In many years of learning English, the author has also met a lot of ambiguity. Many researchers have been made in order to find out and avoid ambiguity when using English. However, many questions have been raised for this topic. Additionally, in English grammar system, cohesive devices play an important role in understanding and interpreting English into Vietnamese. Among them, ellipsis and substitution seem to appear a lot in the text. In some cases, these two cohesive devices also cause some ambiguity. This does not only make students but also the teachers who teach English get difficulty when interpret English sentences. Therefore, it is really important and necessary to avoid this ambiguity. However, to my best knowledge, very little research has been done on analyzing ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution. That is why the author wants to pay her attention and contribution to solve this problem. Ellipsis and substitution are used a lot in all books and at any levels of English learning. However, at low levels the students rarely realize ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution since they mainly get knowledge from teacher but not study themselves. Only from high levels students begin to study about this. Further more, at university level, students have to study many subjects related to ellipsis and substitution as well as ambiguity such as: Discourse Analysis, An Introduction to Linguistics, English Lexicology, ect. Therefore, solving the problem of ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution will also help students at this level study these subjects better. This is also the reason for the author to conduct the survey at university level. 1 Beside that, the author has been trained to be a teacher of English in the near future, so the knowledge of using English words and structures is really important and necessary. To know in what ways ellipsis and substitution cause ambiguity and how to avoid them are indispensable in teaching English. All of the above reasons and factors have inspired the author to choose the thesis entitled: “A study on ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution in English” with the hope that this study will provide English learners a better understanding about ellipsis and substitution and their ambiguity. In addition, the study is implemented with the hope to make a little contribution to solve ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution. 2. Aims of the Study For the reasons mentioned above, the thesis has been done with the aims to: • Provide some general knowledge about: nature of ambiguity, types of ambiguity, factors cause ambiguity, definition of ellipsis, types of ellipsis, definition of substitution and types of substitution. • Investigate the circumstances in which ellipsis and substitution usually cause ambiguity. • Indicate the main ambiguities caused by ellipsis and substitution. • Give some recommendations and suggestions for avoiding ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution. • Give some ellipsis and substitution exercises to practice. 3. Research Questions The study aims to answer the following questions:  In what circumstances do ellipsis and substitution usually cause ambiguity?  What are the main types of ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution?  How to avoid ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution? 4. Scope of the Study This paper deals with a small part of English ambiguity that is ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution and how to avoid it. However, it is too broad and difficult to carry out the survey at all levels of students. Thus, the thesis only focuses on the fourth-year students in Vinh University. All provided knowledge and survey exercises are based on the text books at university level and the research works of many English Linguists. 5. Methods of the Study 2 To carry out the study, the following methods and procedures were employed: • Investigating methods • Analytic and synthetic methods • Descriptive methods • Comparative and contrastive methods 6. Format of the Study The thesis consists of three parts:  Part I: Introduction. This part deals with justification, aims, research questions, scope and methods of the study. The format of the study is also provided.  Part II: Development. This part consists of three chapters:  Chapter 1: Theoretical background This chapter consists of seven main sections: nature of ambiguity, types of ambiguity, definition of ellipsis, types of ellipsis, definition of substitution and types of substitution.  Chapter 2: The survey This chapter consists of two sections. The first section describes such elements related to the methodology of the survey as survey setting and data collection. The second section presents the results of the survey, the analysis of ambiguity caused by ellipsis and substitution through exercises.  Chapter 3: Findings and discussion This chapter presents some major findings about ambiguity which is caused by ellipsis and substitution derived from the analysis. Then some ways of disambiguation are provided. Some exercises for practicing are also given in this chapter.  Part III: Conclusion. This part will summarize what have been presented in the thesis and give some suggestions for further studies. The References and Appendix are provided at the end of the thesis. 3 PART II: DEVELOPMENT CHAPTER 1: THEORETICAL BACKGROUND 1.1. The Nature of Ambiguity To say something about the nature of ambiguity, we have, first of all, to try our best to give an explicit definition of ambiguity, which will help to constrain our scope of inquiry. “Ambiguity - a word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning” (Bach, 1994). For instance, the word “bank” carries several distinct lexical definitions, including “organizations dealing with money” and “the edge of a river”. Another definition: “ambiguity is a one-many relation between syntax and sense.” (Geoffrey Leech, Semantics, Harmondsworth: Penguin Books, 1987, quoted by Pehar) In ‘A Discussion on Ambiguity in English’ Qing-liang, Z. defines ambiguity as follows: Ambiguity is defined as the fact that a word (or an expression) or a sentence, before realization of stress, stop, intonation or other phonological means and without any more presuppositions or contexts than what the word or the sentence itself creates, can be regarded as two or more different descriptive senses. To make our definition clearly understood, it seems necessary to explain it in further detail. Some linguists think that almost every expression or sentence, before realized by phonological means, is ambiguous. For example, by putting stress on different parts of the following ambiguous expression “English teacher”, ambiguity is completely got rid of: English teacher = a teacher who teaches English, whether he is an Englishman is unknown; English teacher = a teacher from Britain, whether he teaches English is unknown. Another example may be the shifting of logical stress to create different presuppositions. Such a sentence as “He came here yesterday” may presuppose quite differently by shifting the local stress: He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not I, you, etc. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not ran, etc. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not other places. He came here yesterday. Presuppose: not other days. It often happens that when we are talking, we don’t realize there is any ambiguity there but when we have it written down and isolate every sentence from the context, we will find that many of the sentences are ambiguous; and the more parts we divide the whole into, the more ambiguous we have. 4 So secondly, we have to point out that ambiguity exists when there are no more contexts than the expression or sentence itself. For example “She can’t bear children” may be understood to mean “She is unable to give birth to children” or “She cannot tolerate children”. The sentence is ambiguous only because it has no more contexts than the sentence itself. By putting enough contexts to make the ambiguous word contained in a certain semantic field; the ambiguity is eliminated, as is illustrated by the following sentences: A: She cannot bear children if they are noisy. B: She cannot bear children because she is sterile. Thirdly, it is necessary to notice that our definition is confined to the descriptive meaning, or the conception meaning of an expression or a sentence. Such sentences as “It’s very cold today”, which may on certain occasion mean “Oh, please close the window” are not within our concern. In short, Ambiguity means something that can mean two different things. Such things are ambiguous. Sometimes the word is used to mean something that can mean several things or that is unclear. In the proper sense it should mean “two different meanings” because “ambi” comes from the Greek word for “two”. 1.2. Types of Ambiguity Actually, as Cruse (1986) mentioned, ambiguities can be classified into several categories. They are: - Lexical ambiguity (Polysymy Relationship): The lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase contains in its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. Example: An untitled photograph showing meanings of brass - Contextual ambiguity (Syntactic ambiguity): Contextual ambiguity means sentences that have no ambiguous words (no polysyms) and can be reasonably figured out with little confusion given to the reader. 5 “The Chicken is ready to Eat” - Semantic ambiguity: This type of ambiguity occurs when there are two or more ways to read the structure of a sentence. Instead of lexical ambiguity (a finite number of known and meaningful context- dependent interpretations), semantic ambiguity gives a choice between any number of possible interpretations, none of them have a standard agreed meaning. For example: “Flying aircraft may be hazardous.” (Chomsky, 1957) - Homonyms & homophones (in spoken English only) For words like “bear” and “bare” (homophones) their sounds the same and may cause ambiguities during daily conversations. For example: The little bare bear According to Bach, “there are two types of ambiguity, lexical and structural. Lexical ambiguity is by far the more common”. (Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on Ambiguity) 6 There are two types of ambiguity: structural and lexical ambiguity. When a sentence can be interpreted in more than one way, it is structurally ambiguous, as exemplified in the following sentence (Hurford & Heasley, 1983: 121): Visiting relatives can be boring, this can be interpreted in two ways: (1) It can be boring to visit relatives. (2) Relatives who are visiting can be boring. Similarly, a word is ambiguous when it has two or more interpretations due to the fact that two or more lexical meanings are associated with it. This lexical ambiguity is traditionally illustrated with the word ‘bank’ which may mean either as “a business establishment in which money is kept for saving or commercial purposes or is invested, supplied for loans, or exchanged” or “the slope of land adjoining a body of water, especially adjoining a river, lake, or channel”. The sentences: (5)I went to the bank, (6) We finally reached the bank, (7) I was on my way to the bank, contain the ambiguous word ‘bank’, thus they are lexically ambiguous. To make the study easier to understand, we should divide ambiguity into two types: Lexical ambiguity and grammatical ambiguity/ structural ambiguity. 1.2.1. Lexical Ambiguity According to Quing-liang, Z. (2007), the lexical ambiguity of a word or phrase contains in its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. "Meaning" hereby refers to whatever should be captured by a good dictionary. For instance, the word “bank” has several distinct lexical definitions, including “financial institution” and “edge of a river”. Another example is as in apothecary. You could say "I bought herbs from the apothecary". This could mean you actually spoke to the apothecary (pharmacist) or went to the apothecary (pharmacy). A sentence is ambiguous if it has two (or more) paraphrases which are not themselves’ paraphrases of each other. 7 . sentence as a whole. Such ambiguity is called 'grammatical ambiguity. ' Compare tables (1) and (2) for an example of grammatical ambiguity: (1) An example. verbal, and clausal ellipsis. 1.5.1. Nominal ellipsis: The definition of nominal ellipsis is indicated by Halliday and Hasan (1976:147) by nominal ellipsis