engleski

Resolving Referential Ambiguity in English as L2

As speakers of a certain language, people produce and receive a great amount of linguistic material each day, which they usually process at a really high speed and without much difficulty. However, rarely is this material completely devoid of anything that could cause confusion and make the process of communication difficult. Ambiguities in language belong to this category. This paper deals with the way speakers process ambiguous elements in language, with the aim of determining the means by which speakers assign one or another possible interpretation to an ambiguous linguistic unit. More specifically, we try to determine how speakers choose one or another possible meaning when dealing with an ambiguous structure. In doing so we must note that ambiguity in this paper is dealt with from the theoretical perspective of language comprehension, and not language production, and the analysis is from the viewpoint of the reader, i.e. based on written, rather than spoken language material. The research involved learners of English as L2, with a group of English native speakers as a control group, and the focus is on referential ambiguity. The main goal was to determine the criteria people use in order to identify the referent of an ambiguous pronoun. Furthermore, we also attempt to answer whether age and level of language learning affect the process of sentence comprehension, whether subjects are aware of ambiguity in processing sentences with ambiguous pronouns, whether they tend to eliminate ambiguity in the completion of such sentences and how they treat ambiguous pronouns in a broader context.

referential ambiguity; pronouns; L2; English; Croatian

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