Review of Related Studies

CHAPTER II REVIEW OF LITERATURE

A. Review of Related Studies

Studies on ambiguity have been conducted by some people. One of them is the study that has been conducted by María Teresa Sánchez Roura 1995. In her study, she focuses on syntactic ambiguity resourceful applications in the creation of jokes. In the end of her study, she concludes that ambiguity may be seen as an obstacle in case it can make a misunderstanding between people, and also may be seen as something beneficial in the way it can make people laugh and can deliver more ideas in economical way less words; usually in advertising. Another study on ambiguity was conducted by Chiara Bucharia 2004 in her article. In this paper, she analyzes ambiguities found on the newspaper headlines and divides it into three main categories of lexical, syntactic, and phonological ambiguity. The study is based on 135 verbally ambiguous headlines found on web sites that lead the reader to interpret it as something humorous. Eventually, it is concluded that the most dominant ambiguous headlines happen in the form of syntactic ambiguity. In the case of lexical ambiguity, the main cause of it is the homonymy of the lexical items in the headlines. Another one was conducted by Mutiara Sekar Utami 2013. Mutiara Sekar Utami conducted a study of lexical and structural ambiguity in the Reader’s Forum of The Jakarta Post. The data were taken from the Reader’s Forum of The Jakarta Post official website, www.thejakartapost.com . In her study, she identifies PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 7 ambiguous words, phrases, or sentences in The Jakarta Post newspaper. The second problem that she analyzes is the part of speeches that cause the ambiguity. She also tries to find whether or not tree diagram can be used to solve structural ambiguity. In the end of her study, she concludes that there are 47 words and 7 phrases considered as ambiguous, and that ambiguous words and phrases found are mostly belong to noun class. She also concludes that tree diagram can help to visualize structural ambiguity well. Another study on ambiguity has also been conducted by G. Khamahani 2013. In his writing, he focuses on structural and lexical ambiguity in English newspaper headlines written by native and non-native journalists. He provides some guidelines for the recognition of ambiguous newspaper headlines of two specific newspapers in a certain country. He identifies the ratio between structural ambiguity and lexical ambiguity in English newspaper headlines written by native and non- native journalists. In the end of his writing, he concludes that the amount of structural ambiguity and lexical ambiguity are not the same in the two sets of headlines. Both structural and lexical ambiguities in English newspaper are found more in foreign newspaper headlines. On the studies mentioned above, all of the data were taken from newspaper either from the headlines or the article. In this thesis, the writer conducted a study on phrasal ambiguity in Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the haze caused by forest fire in Indonesia. In the end of this thesis, the most dominant types of phrasal ambiguity in Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the haze caused by forest fire in PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 8 Indonesia were to be revealed. Although the topic is accidently similar to the study that has been conducted by Mutiara Sekar Utami in a way that the data used in this study is also taken from Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post, the articles that the writer used in conducting the study are different. Thus, the ratio of the types of phrasal ambiguity and its analysis may be different in different articles and topic. This study is an attempt to improve the study that has been conducted by Mutiara Sekar Utami and other studies related to this topic.

B. Review of Related Theories