A CONTRASTIVE STUDY OF STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITIES IN ENGLISH AND INDONESIAN NEWS TITLES: A STUDY ON X-BAR THEORY

Abstract

This research aims to discover types and differences of structural ambiguities between English and Indonesian through news titles. The data were collected by observing titles from English and Indonesian news titles. They were analyzed using X – bar theory. This study used distributional and referential methods for analyzing data. The result shows that there are four types of structural ambiguities found in both languages, the shifting of parts of speech, the position of prepositional phrase, the position of attributive word order, and the types of adjunct. In terms of parts of speech, English has only one kind of change, noun-verb. However, in Indonesian, there are two kinds of changes, noun-verb and verb-adjective. In terms of the position of prepositional phrase, English has various PPs indicating instrument, location, purpose, and time, whereas Indonesian has only two types of PP, indicating location and purpose. In terms of the position of attributive word order, there is no significant difference between both languages. Finally, in terms of the types of adjunct, English has participle adjunct, meanwhile Indonesian has verb adjunct.