Background of the study

CHAPTER I INTRODUCTION

A. Background of the study

Language is essential for human life due to its function as a medium for people to communicate with each other. Chomsky 1979:88 states that language serves essentially for the expression of thought. In addition, Sapir 1921:8 states that language is a purely human and non-instinctive method of communicating ideas, emotions and desires by means of voluntarily produced symbols. With language, people can express their feelings, their ideas, and their emotions. As social creatures, people use language by forming words so that they can deliver messages and information to one another in the form of spoken and written form. With spoken or written language, people can communicate with each other both directly and indirectly. Nowadays, with the developments of technology, people can communicate with each other through many ways. It has been easier for people to gain any information about what happens even in other parts of the world. Written language is important for people since people cannot always talk to others directly. It happens because of distance, time, and a lot more reasons. There are a lot of types of written language, some of which are business letters, news articles, novels, scripts, and song lyrics. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 2 Today, English is still considered as an international language that plays an important role as a medium for a lot of people from different countries around the world to communicate. Crystal 2003: 2 states “These are the kinds of statement which seem so obvious that most people would give up hardly a second thought. Of course English is a global language, they would say. You hear it on television spoken by politicians from all over the world. Wherever you travel, you see English signs and advertisements. Whenever you enter a hotel or restaurant in a foreign city, they will understand English, and there will be an English menu. “ There are a lot of media using English as the medium to communicate with people globally. Thus, a lot of people around the world learn this language and use the language so that their ideas, feeling and emotions can be shared globally through media of communication such as websites, magazines, and newspapers. In Indonesia, one of daily English newspapers published in the country is The Jakarta Post. Even though language has a very important role in communication between people, language has its weakness in delivering message. Sometimes, people experience miscommunication in using language to communicate. Miscommunication mentioned before may happen when utterance, whether spoken or written, is vague or ambiguous by means that their utterance may not be delivered clearly or may have different interpretations. Ambiguity describes a linguistic phenomenon whereby expressions are potentially understood in two or more ways, an ambiguous expression has more than one interpretation in its context Asher, 1994:90. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 3 While ambiguity is a phenomenon when an expression has more than one interpretation in its context, vague expression is a word that has more than one referents, in which the referents share similar features happens because things in the world do not come in clear, distinct categories Malmkjær, 1996:394. In addition, Jurafsky 2009:549 states that vagueness is closely related to ambiguity. Like ambiguity, vagueness can make it difficult to determine what to do with a particular input on the basis of its meaning representations. Vagueness, however does not give rise to multiple representations. An example of this is in the phrase ‘I want to eat Italian food’. A vague representation of the meaning of this phrase may be appropiate for some purposes, while a more specific phrase may be needed for other purposes. There are two types of ambiguity: lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity Mihalicek and Wilson, 2011: 227. Since the data observed in this study are written data, the writer uses theory of lexical and structural ambiguity. In addition, in this study, the writer is going to focus more in ambiguity than in vague expression. Based on the phenomenon mentioned before, the writer was interested in conducting a research related to ambiguity. Thus, in this study, the writer analyzed phrasal ambiguity found in Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the haze caused by forest fire in Indonesia. The writer chooses to discuss the haze caused by forest fire in Indonesia because when the writer started writing the thesis, this issue was happening and was the hottest topic of the period. PLAGIAT MERUPAKAN TINDAKAN TIDAK TERPUJI 4

B. Problem Formulation