大学生英语写作中歧义现象分析 Analysis of Ambiguity in EFL Writing of College Students开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义（文献综述）

ambiguity is a universal linguistic phenomenon whichexists in every language in the world. owing to its large vocabulary pool andspecificity of sentence structure, english is no exception. in mostcircumstances, ambiguity exists as a barrier which blocks the effectivecommunications and discourses. and for many forms of application of languagetechnology such as text retrieval and machine translation, ambiguitypotentially triggers error. however, in certain applications like advertisingand news reporting, ambiguity can also help to carry some potential informationand realize rhetoric functions.

on account of ambiguity’s dual pragmatic significance,this phenomenon has already attracted considerate concerns from both domesticand foreign linguistic researchers. trangott (1980) claimed that, “creativityis a linguistic universal, that is a characteristic shared by all humanlanguages. ambiguity is another, and is of particular interest to linguists.” shealso pointed out the reasons of formation of ambiguity as the fact that thereis more than one meaning corresponding to most of each english word, and alsoas the multiple meaning of sentences, which “differs in this respect ofmathematics”. moreover, definition of ambiguity, classification of ambiguityand disambiguation strategies varies in different schools of research. forinstance, walton (1996) defined ambiguity to six types under three dimensions,while herndon (1976) identified ambiguity in perspectives of deep structure andsurface structure of sentences. most importantly, there is obvious differencebetween the general methods of ambiguity analysis conducted by domestic andforeign researchers: in china, grammatical analysis limited in traditionallinguistic field is the most typical research method, but in foreign academia,studying ambiguity in terms of psycholinguistics and cognitive linguistics,specifically, like from the mechanism of human brain and eye movements, is morecommon. based on these distinctions, the summarization and comparison of thepresent researches is going to be mentioned in this paper.

2. 研究的基本内容与方案

Thisresearch is going to include the following contents: first, an introduction andcomparison of the previous researches on ambiguity of English language. Second,data analysis, the EFL timed writings collected from 25 sophomore Englishmajors （21 female and four male) in Wuhan University of Technology will beestablished as a corpus. As for the data collection, all the collected writingsare completed under these conditions: two drafts are required in students’writing. The first draft was completed in class within 30 minutes (lengthrequirement: three paragraphs, around 200 words). Then the teacher graded thefirst draft and students submitted the second drafts (length requirement: fiveparagraphs, around 500 words). And then, ambiguous sentences in these writingswill be highlighted in original contexts and meanwhile listed in another filefor further analysis. Every ambiguity will be subdivided according to the levelwhere they exist. Later on, a summary on the frequency of each category ofambiguity can be made and illustrated in a chart. By comparison of the abovestatistics, the sensitive areas of ambiguity appears in these writings can beranked, and disambiguation strategy of each kind of ambiguity can be furtherdiscussed. The target of this paper is to get a list of the common reasons forambiguity in EFL writing, and find out the most frequent reasons, and finallyprobe into the disambiguation strategy which can help promote efficiency ofEnglish language learners’ second language output.

3. 研究计划与安排

before 20th january : settlement of the title

before20th march:submission of the outline

before 25th april: submission of the first draft

4. 参考文献（12篇以上）

[1] chen, y. ananalysisofenglishambiguityanditsvalueinpracticaluse[j]. us-china foreign language, 2013, 11(6): 461-467.

[2] frazier, l. rayner, k. makingand correcting errors during sentence comprehension: eye movements in theanalysis of structurally ambiguous sentences [j]. cognitive psychology,1982(14): 78-210.

[3] frenck-mestre, c. p. prince.second language autonomy [j]. journal of memory and language 1997(37): 481-501.