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Technical English has the main grammatical features of a lot of application of passive voices ,nouns or noun phrases, non-finite verb phrases, uses of “it” to replace the real subject, and long and complex sentences.(Niu Manshan 2010 http//:baike.baidu.com/view/2153883.htm)
1.2 Research design
Methodologically speaking, 50 sheets of English scientific paper from June 2010 to September 2010 on the Chinese Academy of Sciences Science and technology periodical acquisition platform (CAS-OAJ) are taken as the corpus. All the ambiguity phenomena are selected from the corpus and are analyzed on syntactical level. More than 80 examples are collected and classified into five types of ambiguity, namely, negative sentence with “not”, adjective and coordinate modificands, adverb and its modified part, the ambiguous antecedent, and the improper ellipsis.
With a combination of quantitative and qualitative applied to analysis the ambiguous examples, there are three ways to avoid ambiguity. There are rewriting the sentence, doing annotation in the ambiguous part in the article and making up the omitted parts when ellipsis used improperly.
2 Ambiguity
2. 1 Ambiguity in syntactical level
“Ambiguity is generally taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear multiple (legitimate) interpretations” (Adam sennet, 2011: 34-37).A word, phrase, or sentence is ambiguous if it has more than one meaning. Ambiguity is mainly classified to three types, namely, lexical ambiguity, logic ambiguity, syntactical ambiguity.
2.1.1Lexical ambiguity
The lexicon contains entries that are homophonous, or even co-spelled, but differ in meanings and even syntactic categories. Lexical ambiguity means the ambiguity that an inpidual word or phrase that can be used (in different contexts) to express two or more different meanings
Example 1
Mr. Collins, the priest, is going to marry Jane at the church.
The word marry has two meanings, the first one is :marry (someone), so that the whole sentence means: The priest Mr. Collins will be married in the church with Jane; the second: give (someone) the witnesses, the sentence becomes the priest Mr. Collins will be in the church as Jane’s witness (Jane and another man get married).
Example 2
As part of the treatment of the data pooled for the six subjects, the significance of the beneficial effect on Acidogenicity of lague was determined.
The word “significance” here may cause lexical ambiguity. In our daily life, significance often means importance, and we may understand the sentence like this “The importance of the beneficial effect of plaque production of acid was determined, as part of the treatment of the data pooled for the six subjects.”But “significance” also has another meaning of “conspicuousness”, so we can also understand the sentence like this: as part of the treatment of the data pooled for the six subjects ， 投 the conspicuousness of the beneficial effect on acidogenicty of lague was determined by the scientist. From the context, the text is about the experimental statistical treatment of data, and research is about the conspicuousness acidogenicty of lague, so it is more appropriate to take significance as conspicuousness. If we can understand the context better, we can avoid the lexical ambiguity easily.
2.1.2Logic ambiguity
Logic is very important in technical English, including progressive relation, causal relations, comparison relation, and so on. Logic ambiguity means the ambiguity occurs on logic level, a sentence may have more than one meaning because of the
uncertain context or the readers’ different position. If we cannot make out the logic relations, we cannot understand the meaning clearly.
Example 3
John solved the problem too.
It's natural on first read to think that the sentence carries the presupposition that someone else solved the problem. But that need not be the case: it may presuppose that John solved the problem as well as having done some other thing, as in: