Introducing Ambiguity in News Headlines

Ambiguity is a phenomenon that can be discovered in words, phrases, or sentences. Those units can be considered as ambiguous if the unit can be interpreted into different meanings. In Syntax study, ambiguity usually occurs in the structure of phrases and sentences. Therefore, ambiguity in Syntax is defined as syntactic ambiguity. Cruse (1986: 58) states that syntactic ambiguity is a type of ambiguity where the various interpretations involve similar lexical units. Furthermore, the ambiguity necessarily occurs only due to how the structure elements are put together. MacDonald, et al (1994) also elaborate the occurrence of syntactic ambiguity. They say that syntactic ambiguity can be found when a sequence of words is syntactically interpreted in various ways and resulting in the words sequence having more than one syntactic meaning. Carnie (2013: 97) provides an example on syntactic ambiguity on a sentence.

“The man killed the king with a knife”

He explains that the sentence is ambiguous as the Prepositional Phrase “with the knife” could modify the verb killed. This interpretation means that someone uses a knife to kill the king. The second interpretation occurs if the Prepositional Phrase “with the knife” modifies the noun king. This interpretation means that the king is holding a knife when they are killed.

Ambiguity could be found, not only in conversation, but also in news headlines. News headlines use a language type of structure consisting of single words or phrases instead of clauses and sentences. This strategy in language usage helps journalists in creating more attractive, and appealing headlines (Tiono, 2003). However, this strategy may create many interpretations that make the headlines ambiguous. The ambiguous headlines may result in different interpretations. This may create confusion among the readers.

Source:

Carnie, A. (2013). Syntax: A Generative Introduction. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.

Cruse, D. A. (1986). Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

MacDonald, M. C., et al. (1994). Lexical Nature of Syntactic Ambiguity Resolution. Psychological Review, 101(4), 676–703.

Tiono, N. I. (2003). An Analysis on Syntactic and Semantic Factors Found in Newspaper Headlines. k@ta, 5(1), 49–61.