ABSTRACT
Language is essential for human life due to its function as a medium for people to communicate with each other. With language, people can express their feelings, ideas, and emotions. As a social creature, people use language by forming words so that they can deliver messages and information to one another in a form of spoken and written one. Even though language has a very important role in communication between people, language has its weakness in delivering message. Sometimes, people experience miscommunication by using language. Miscommunication mentioned before may happen when utterance, whether spoken or written, is ambiguous, by means that their utterance have different interpretations.
In this study, the writer identifies common phrases in Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the smog caused by forest fire in Indonesia that causes ambiguity. The writer also identifies what kinds of ambiguity are observed in the phrase. The writer analyzes the dominant phrases that cause ambiguity, the kinds of ambiguity, the interpretations of the ambiguity found, and the frequency of each kinds of ambiguity found.
The data used in conducting the study were obtained from the articles in The Jakarta Post official website, www.thejakartapost.com. The writer picked two articles randomly from the 37 articles that have been gathered from 4 August 2015 when the issue was spread and became a big public attention until 2 December 2015 when the fire was eventually put off. In order to solve the problem, the writer uses semantic and syntactic approaches. Semantics, the study of meaning abstracted away from those aspects that are derived from the intentions of the speaker, is used to find a phrase which is identified as the cause of the ambiguity. The writer needs semantic approach in order to identify what types of ambiguity that occur in the phrases. The syntactic approach is used to identify structural ambiguities which occur in the phrase. Since the writer analyses the ambiguous phrases found in the Reader’s Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the smog caused by forest fire in Indonesia, these approaches can be used. Since the study is Document (Content) Analysis of Qualitative research, the writer only uses theory in analyzing the data. The writer focuses on analyzing the content of the ambiguous phrases found in the Reader’s Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the smog caused by forest fire in Indonesia.
The results of this study shows that in Readers Forum section of The Jakarta Post newspaper discussing the smog caused by forest fire in Indonesia published on 2015, there are 26 phrases that cause ambiguity found. They are 20 noun phrases and 6 verb phrases. Based on the data, the most frequent kind of phrase that causes ambiguity is noun phrase.
