Sometimes a non-native listener does not understand what the speaker said to them. It is not …show more content…
When this happens, it will cause confusion for the listener or reader especially for the second language speaker of English. So that the communication between the two sides cannot be smooth or even complete.
Ambiguous can find in everywhere, not only when people say something to us or spoken but we can also find it in written forms, like in the newspaper, magazine, advertisement, book, and so on. This ambiguity can happen if there is more than one meaning which can be interpreted by the people who read or listen to the ambiguous sentences, utterances or phrases.
Ambiguity can be classified into two different categories named lexical ambiguity and structural ambiguity. Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word has more than one possible meanings. Structural ambiguity is a situation where one sentence has more than one meaning due to its sentence …show more content…
(4) The use of bleach on the clothes is not recommended.
In the first sentence use is a verb, and in the second a noun, that is, we have a case of lexical ambiguity. An English-Malay dictionary will say that the “use” ( verb) can be translated by (menggunakan and menghabiskan) use and finish, whereas the noun is translated as penggunaan or manfaat. One way a reader or an automatic parser can find out whether the noun or verb form of use is being employed in a sentence is by working out whether it is grammatically possible to have a noun or a verb in the place where it occurs. We can give translation engines some information about grammar rules. This is useful in that it allows them to filter out some wrong analyses. However, giving our system knowledge about syntax will not allow us to determine the meaning of all ambiguous words. This is because words can have several meanings even within the same part of speech. For example the word “use”, it can be either a verb or a