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In recent years, the researches regarding the ambiguity study has been conducted by numerous scholars in the field of linguistics, such as Graeme Hirst (1987), Charles Clifton (1994) and Yael Ravin (2000). What they mainly focus on is related with psycholinguistics and computational linguistics. Their attention is not on the phenomena that cause ambiguity; instead, they put more emphasis on the ambiguity resolution mechanisms and processes.
The first linguistic study on headlines was conducted by Straumann in 1935. That was a study on the grammar of headlines in English newspapers. In recent years, quite a few researches have been conducted in the field of newspaper texts, from a socio-linguistic perspective (Arnold 1969; Bell 1991) and from a text-linguistic perspective (Van Dijk 1998; Dor 2003). Most of the studies focus on English headlines and they are mostly descriptive (Mardh 1980; Simon-Vandenbergen 1981).
As for the study related to linguistic ambiguity, most of them appeared in the fields of psycholinguistics and computational linguistics (Hirst 1987; Guenthner 1996; Clifton et al. 1994; Ravin and Leaccock 2000).
The analysis of the causes of the ambiguity are less numerous and are reviewed in Stageberg (1971). Stagberg distinguishes between lexical ambiguity, syntactic ambiguity, class ambiguity and script ambiguity that are resolved by intonation. Taha (1983:251) follows Stageberg and claims that ‘‘structural or syntactic ambiguity results from using carelessly constructed sentences that lack formal signals to clarify their sentence structure’’ and proposes a twelve-category classification that attempts to account for types of syntactic ambiguity in both written and oral contexts. As far as I know, the study regarding the unintentional ambiguity in newspaper headlines is still rare.
To my best knowledge, the solutions to the unintentional ambiguity have not been provided by any scholars. In the fourth chapter of this thesis, some solutions are raised to the unintentional ambiguity in the cased analyzed in the third chapter.
This thesis focuses on the analysis of the ambiguity in the newspaper headlines on three different linguistic levels, namely lexical, syntactic and phonological level. The purpose of this research is to make non-native English speakers become more aware of the ambiguity when reading newspapers or any news on any media so that they can acquire information in an efficient and effective manner.
2 Ambiguity in English Newspaper Headlines
The newspaper headline, as a major component of a newspaper, has become an interesting subject for researcher in the fields of linguistics and stylistics. The reason behind it, as Bell (1991) states: is that newspaper headlines are considered to have their own characteristics and status in news discourse. Newspaper headlines are written in a special kind of language with its own vocabulary and grammar. The grammar system employed by the writer is somehow different from the ordinary. Just as Fairclough (1995:21) states, “headlines have distinctive syntactic properties, which make them a grammatical oddity.” The headline is a unique type of text. It has a range of functions that specifically dictate its shape, content and structure, and it operates within a range of restrictions that limit the freedom of the writer (Reah, 1998:13-14).