STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY ON BBC NEWS INSTAGRAM POST

Journal of English Language Learning (JELL), Vol. 6 No 1, 35-52 ISSN 2599-1019 Structural Ambiguity on BBC News’ Instagram Post Elma Solihati1*, Dadan Rusmana2, Erlan Aditya Ardiansyah3 1, 2, 3 State Islamic University of Sunan Gunung Djati, Bandung, West Java, Indonesia 1* , , Abstract: The arrangement of words in a grammatically correct sentence can sometimes still lead to multiple interpretations. BBC News, in its Instagram posts, contains sentences that are structurally ambiguous. Therefore, this study aims to find out types of structural ambiguity on BBC News’ Instagram posts that are published from February 2021 until July 2022 and the interpretations arise from those ambiguities. This study uses qualitative method with document analysis technique. The analysis is done by some steps: investigating which word or phrase that makes the sentences become ambiguous, categorizing the ambiguities to their each types, finding out meanings that are produced by those ambiguities, parsing the sentences by using tree diagram, and interpreting the actual meaning of the news headlines or sentences by relating it to the context. The result shows that there are fifty posts from BBC News that contain sentences which are structurally ambiguous. Using theory of Hirst, those ambiguities are categorized as attachment and analytical ambiguity. The ambiguities are mostly caused by phrases that are unclear what their functions are in a sentence. From the result, it can be seen that structural ambiguity is a language phenomenon that is still widely found in our surrounding, not to mention the news headlines. Keywords: structural ambiguity; BBC News; Instagram; headline; sentence INTRODUCTION Nowadays, social media has become a necessity for many people. There is a lot of news and information that can be accessed through social media, one of which is Instagram. Instagram users can access a lot of news both from within and outside the country through many news accounts, such as the @bbcnews account. BBC News is the largest news broadcasting division worldwide. Through its Instagram account, BBC News presents a lot of the latest news coming from abroad. Obviously, the news is presented in English. Written text such that is formal text that pays close attention to grammar. However, the arrangement of word, phrase, clause, or sentence can cause ambiguity even though it is grammatically correct. Ambiguity is language phenomenon when there is more than one reading can be assigned to a sentence (Bustam, 2012). Furthermore, Rodman (in Puspitasari & Beratha, 2019) said that a word or a sentence is considered ambiguous if it can be understood in more than one way. From the definition above, it can be concluded that ambiguity occurs when a language unit has more than one meaning. According to Ullman (in Fitri, 2019), there are three kinds of ambiguity: phonological ambiguity, lexical ambiguity, and grammatical (structural) ambiguity. Phonological ambiguity refers to the sound of language that gives rise to two or more interpretations for the hearer. So, hearers hear the same sound of one expression but they have different interpretations of each other (Sinambela et al., 2014). Lexical ambiguity occurs when a word or lexeme has more than one meaning. A word is considered ambiguous when it involves two lexical items which have Page | 35 Journal of English Language Learning (JELL), Vol. 6 No 1, 35-52 ISSN 2599-1019 identical forms yet have different or unrelated meanings (Rahman & Nurjannah, 2017). Meanwhile, grammatical or structural ambiguity occurs when a sentence gives rise to more than one interpretation caused by the phrase, clause, or sentence structure (Charina, 2017). However, this study limits only structural ambiguity as its focus. Various interpretations can lead to misunderstanding for the readers, so that the message or content of the news is not conveyed perfectly. Therefore, it is important for readers to know how to solve this ambiguity problem, so that they can know the actual meaning contained in the news. The reason why the researchers choose this object (@bbcnews’ Instagram posts) is because BBC News is the largest news broadcasting division worldwide. This means that people can get the latest news or information about events happening in the world through this account. It is obvious that many Instagram users follow this account. Therefore, this study of structural ambiguity is expected to help people avoid misunderstandings in understanding news headlines or sentences so that they can find out the actual meaning by reading the entire content of the news. Research on ambiguity had been conducted by several researchers, some of them are Rohmaniah (2017) with her thesis entitled Syntactic Ambiguity on Students' Writing in State Senior High School 9 Malang; Kristian (2018) with his thesis entitled Lexical and Structural Ambiguity Found in the Jakarta Post Articles on the E-ID Graft Case; and Fitri (2019) with her thesis entitled Ambiguity in Short Stories by Ahmad Tohari as Translated by Rosemary Kesauly. Different with those previous studies, this study aims to find out the types of structural ambiguity on BBC News’ Instagram posts and the interpretations arise from those ambiguities. The researchers use semantics and syntactic approach in this study, since semantics is the study of the relation between language entity and meaning (Kroeger, 2018, p. 4) and syntax is “the study of the principles and processes by which sentences are constructed in particular languages.” (Chomsky, 2002, p. 11). So, both are the most appropriate approaches to use to solve the statements of problem. The main theory used in this research is theory of Hirst regarding to types of structural ambiguity. According to Hirst (1987, pp. 131–137) there are three types of structural ambiguity: attachment, gap-finding, and analytical. Attachment ambiguity occurs when a syntactic constituent can be attached to more than one part of a sentence. Gap finding ambiguity is an ambiguity that is caused by two possible gaps, means there are two possible gaps in a sentence which lead to different meaning and interpretation. Meanwhile, analytical ambiguity is type of structural ambiguity that is caused due to certain phrases which have parts that can be combined with other words in a sentence (Sylviana, 2020). In order to complete the research objective, the theory of Sternefeld and Zimmermann is also used in this research. Sternefeld & Zimmermann (2013, p. 28) offers a solution, namely by paraphrasing the sentence into an unambiguous reading to clearly see the difference in meaning. So, to eliminate ambiguous meaning in a sentence, the sentence must be paraphrased with a clear sentence which does not have multiple interpretations. METHODS The method used in this research is qualitative method. Qualitative research is research that is descriptive and tends to use analysis. According to Creswell (in Salvador, 2016), (...truncated)