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摘要. iii
1 Introduction 1
2 Ambiguity in English Newspaper Headlines 4
2.1 The Features of Newspaper Headlines 4
2.1.1 Lexical Features of English Newspaper Headlines 4
2.1.2 Structural Features of English Newspaper Headlines 7
2.2 The Uniqueness of the Language in Newspaper Headlines 8
2.3 The Causes of the Ambiguity in Newspaper Headlines 9
3 Analysis of Unintentional Ambiguity in the Newspaper Headlines 11
3.1 Analysis of Lexical Ambiguity 11
3.1.1 Nouns 12
3.1.2 Verbs 14
3.2 Analysis of Syntactic Ambiguity in the Headlines 15
3.2.1 Class Ambiguity 16
3.2.2 Referential Ambiguity 18
3.3 Phonological Ambiguity 19
4 Conclusion 21
Bibliography 23
1 Introduction
Ambiguity in languages is not uncommon. A paragraph can be ambiguous; a sentence can be ambiguous; sometimes, a phrase or even a word can be ambiguous. Comedians take advantage of the innate feature of ambiguity in languages to create humor; News writers often intentionally use the ambiguous features of languages to create appealing headlines; however, not everyone is aware of the ambiguity within their utterances all the time, which can cause awkward and embarrassing situations. The register of newspaper headlines has been a great resource for the phenomenon of linguistic ambiguity. The headline, as a major component of the news, encapsulates the content in minimum number of words. It is a fact that ambiguity widely exists in different genres; however, the genre of newspaper headlines is outstanding as the most essential source of linguistic ambiguity. In newspaper headlines, the limit of the words compromises the expression of information, hence, to some extent, the limit makes newspaper headlines more likely and more easily to be ambiguous.
Above is the reason why this thesis sets out to conduct the analysis of the ambiguity in this specific register, newspaper headline. Admittedly, news writers sometimes do employ the widely-existing ambiguity in languages to create appealing headlines; however, the headlines to be analyzed in this thesis are the ones that dominated by unintentional ambiguity.
The newspaper headline is an interesting area to research. Fairclough said that “Headlines have distinctive syntactic properties, which make them a grammatical oddity” (1995:21). A careful study of newspaper headlines reveals that a headline is an autonomous text which carries various functions within the newspaper's discourse and has specific features as regards language use (see Reah, 1998).
All the newspaper headlines to be studied in the present paper are collected from the Internet, mostly unverifiable and unofficial rescores. However, the websites do confirm the realness and the authenticity of the headlines; and few of them have actual resources. All the headlines are found through the search engines, such as Google, Baidu and Yahoo, under the keywords such as “ambiguous”, “headlines”, “newspapers” and “linguistics”. In total, 50 ambiguous headlines are collected; however, only 22 of them will be analyzed.
What is worth a mention is that the collected headlines are separated from the original content and context where useful information, e.g. pictures and subtitles, which can facilitate the understanding of the semantic meaning of the headlines.