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CHAPTER II REVIEW OF RELATED LITERATURE
In this chapter, the researcher divides the chapter into two parts namely theoretical description and theoretical framework. The first part, which is
theoretical description, consists of two sections. It talks about the review of related studies and also literature. The other part, which is theoretical framework,
explains the correlation of the theories with the study, and how the theories help the researcher to solve the problem formulations.
A. Theoretical Description
This part consist of two sections. Those sections are Review of Related Studies and Review of Related Literature. From those two sections, the researcher
would review other researchers’ works and also linguists’ literature related to the study conducted.
1. Related Studies
Ambiguity is one phenomenon in English and other languages that might attract linguists to study more about it. Studies on ambiguity had been conducted
by Bucaria 2004, Grenat and Taher 2008, and Tambunan 2009. Studies on disambiguation, corpora, and semantic interpreter programs have also conducted
by Hirst 1983, 1988 and Hansen and Sargen 2012. Bucaria 2004 conducted interesting study about lexical and syntactic ambiguity that causes humor on the
newspaper headlines. The data of the study were taken from the online newspaper
12 headlines. In the study, she found that the lexical ambiguity owned more spaces
than syntactical and phonological ambiguity. 52.9 of the data belonged to lexical ambiguity, 46.66 of the data belonged to syntactical ambiguity, while
only one sample 0.74 was in form of phonological ambiguity. From the study, she also found the new configurations for the order of the phrases in the
newspaper headlines. Grenat and Taher 2008 conducted a study related to translation and
ambiguity. In the study, they examined structural ambiguity and how the interpreter or translator handled ambiguous structures. Translator and interpreter
are responsible to render the same structural meaning in source language into the target language. However, not all ambiguous structures in the source language
have the equivalent ambiguous structures in the target language. Most of the ambiguous structures presented in the paper could be rendered into equivalent
target language used in the research, which was Arabic. However, there were some sentences which could not be rendered due to the differences of
morphological and syntactic factors that English and Arabic have. Previous study had also been conducted by Tambunan 2009. She
conducted the study to complete her bachelor degree in English Letter Department in North Sumatera University. She wrote The Analysis of Lexical and Structural
Ambiguity in Your Letters of The Jakarta Post. That study pointed out that there were 50 ambiguous words and phrases found during the study, 51.1 of them was
structural ambiguity and the rest was lexical ambiguity. That study also pointed
13 out that most of the ambiguous words were verbs, while all of the structural
ambiguity caused by noun phrases. In this study, the researcher is going to conduct the study on ambiguity in
the newspaper. The purpose of the study is to confirm the previous study that has been done by Tambunan 2009. The researcher is going to analyze the ambiguity
in The Jakarta Post newspaper. However, the researcher is going to conduct the research wider than the previous study. The previous study took the data from the
section Your Letters, while in this study the data are taken from the section Reader’s Forum. In the forum, there are a lot of sub-sections. There are Your
Letters, Comment, Text Your Say, and Issues of the Day. The researcher decides to widen the scope because the researcher is curious about the way people
communicate through written discourse in the mass media. The researcher also finds it interesting in the way people state their ideas through short message
service SMS which is used in the Test Your Say section. The researcher would also apply tree diagram in the research which was
not applied in the previous research. The researcher uses tree diagram because the researcher believes that tree diagram can be used to enable the reader to interpret
the meaning of the ambiguous phrase or sentence.
2. Theories of Meaning
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