Syntactical Analysis on Structural Ambiguity Found in IELTS Reading Comprehenson Texts

ABSTRACT

As a part of language, sentence or utterance, becomes the important thing in distributing information. For this reason, a speaker or writer as the informant has to have clear sentences in order to give the specific understanding. Absolutely we can think that it includes many part of understanding, such as; meaning, ways, and grammatical as well

Analyzing IELTS reading comprehension, this study aims at answer of the research problems: what is the structural ambiguity found in IELTS reading comprehension texts? And what structural distinction among the representations of structural ambiguity found in IELTS reading comprehension texts? The analysis uses “tree diagram” theory proposed by Diane D. Bornstein in her book “An Introduction to Transformational Grammar” (1977)

Using descriptive qualitative research, this study goes on three steps in analyzing the data as follow: Firstly, finding the structural ambiguous sentence from IELTS reading comprehension texts by reading it line by line. The next step is analyzing what structural ambiguity is found in IELTS reading comprehension texts. And then finding the structural distinction among the representations of structural ambiguity found in IELTS reading comprehension texts is done. The last, is taking the conclusion of the research.

The result of analysis is that the structural ambiguity found is phrasal structural ambiguity and clausal structural ambiguity. The most common structural ambiguity found is ambiguous in the phrase. In the form of phrasal structural ambiguity, the difference of most of sentences is in the position of adverbial phrase. In the form of clausal structural ambiguity, the difference of most of sentences is in the position of adjective clause.

There are some suggestions given to the students of the State Islamic University of Malang (UIN) and everyone wanting to concern in studying the same field that is structural ambiguity. they have to get another object of analysis; such as other reading texts of English capability test, articles, Holy Qur’an, etc, to know another structural ambiguity commonly found. They should use another theory in analyzing the data to enrich the structural analysis research.