SYNTACTIC AMBIGUITY AS A VIOLATION OF MORPHOLOGICAL-SYNTACTIC COMPOSITION IN THE SENTENCE (ON THE MATERIAL OF ENGLISH NEWS MEDIA DISCOURSE)

Abstract

The article considers a phenomenon of ambiguity arising at the level of syntactic structure of a sentence. On the basis of available scientific works the concept of ambiguity as a linguistic phenomenon is summarized. The main focus of the study is the analysis of types of syntactic ambiguity – attachment, bracketing, coordination, labeling and referential – and the main ways of its resolving. It is also established to evaluate whether it is appropriate to use the constituency grammar method for verifying ambiguity. As a result, it is found that this method, alongside traditional communicative-pragmatic analysis, allows to visualise and confirm changes in meaning in the structures of ambiguous sentences by drawing syntactic trees. Thus, these trees perfectly illustrate the difference in the relationship between words within a sentence. In turn, transformational analysis allows to neutralise structural ambiguity through several variants of paraphrasing the original structure to actualise a particular contextual meaning. The research is conducted on the material of English news headlines of The Mirror website.