Ambiguities in Newspaper Headlines

Ambiguities in Newspaper Headlines.

Abstract

This research shows that ambiguity is an important topic worthy of consideration and exploration. It is a phenomenon that learners of English may very possibly encounter.

As argued by many authors, ambiguity can be found everywhere in language and is usually difficult to understand. Clare (1993) suggests that “ambiguity is an obstacle to be ignored or a problem to be solved for people to understand each other”.

Kelvin (1998) believes that there is a direct relationship between vision and cognition with respect to newspaper headlines.

Semantically ambiguous media headlines have been looked at from the two levels in which ambiguity is broken down.

The approach which was employed in this analysis is called the lexico-grammar which is concerned with the syntactic organisation of words into utterances, using the systemic functional grammar or linguistic theory.

Table of Contents

Title Page

Approval Page

Dedication

Acknowledgements

Table of contents

Abstract

CHAPTER ONE

• Background to the study
• Statement of the problem
• Objectives of the study
• Significance of the study
• Scope and Delimitation
• Introduction

CHAPTER TWO

• Language and Communication
• Rules of Communication
• Ambiguity
• Types of Ambiguity
• Structure and Language of newspaper headlines
• Semantic Ambiguities in Nigerian newspaper

CHAPTER THREE

• Introduction
• Methodology
• Sample and Sampling techniques
• Source of data
• Limitation of the methodology

CHAPTER FOUR

• Introduction
• Some Semantic interpretation of Lexical Ambiguities
• Semantic interpretation of some Structural Ambiguities

CHAPTER FIVE

5.0 Summary of findings and Conclusion

References

Introduction

Background of Study

The crux of this research is semantic ambiguity as it affects communication effectiveness of media headlines of print media.

Semantic ambiguity is concerned with meaning relations at sentence level which is a sub-field in the study of semantics that deals with the influence of one word upon another in sentences.

Other related terms are tautology, redundancy, paraphrase, anomaly. Ambiguity is defined as a grammatical phenomenon in which an expression can be given more than one interpretation and could be caused by syntactic and semantic factors.

Semantic ambiguity is a situation in which an expression can be given more than one interpretation based on the meaning of a word or words which in themselves can be misinterpreted.

References

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Akwanya. A.N. (2007). Semantics and Discourse. Theories of Meaning andTextual Analysis: Nigeria: Acena publishers.

Baran. J. Stanley (2004).Introduction to Mass Communication. 3rd. Ed.New York:Mc-Graw-Hill.

Brittner. R.J. (2005). Mass Communication: An Introduction. 5th Ed.Nigeria: Heinemann Educational Books.

Chomskey, N. (1965). Aspect of the Theory of Syntax. Cambridge: M.I.Press.

Coulhard. M. (2007). An Introduction to Discourse. Theories of Meaning and TextualAnalysis. Nigeria: Acena Publishers.