A STUDY OF LEXICAL AMBIGUITY OF ARTICLES IN THE JAKARTA POST NEWSPAPERS

Basyuni, A, F. A Study of Lexical Ambiguity of Articles in The jakarta post Newspaper. Thesis. English Study Program of The Faculty of Social and Cultural Sciences, University of Trunojyo Madura, Advisor: Dr. Masduki, M.P,d
The objectives of this study were to identify the types of lexical ambiguity and the factors of the lexical ambiguity that occur in The jakarta post newspaper. The writer used the theory proposed by Ulmann (1972 and 1977) to identify the types and also the factors of the lexical ambiguity in The jakarta post newspaper.
The method of this study is descriptive method as what has been proposed by Yusuf (2014). The source of data is taken from online newspaper, The jakarta post newspaper, www.thejakartapost.com. In order to get the data, the writer took The jakarta post articles on January 31,2019, the articles are included 12 articles of business topic, 7 articles of world topic, 6 articles of city topic, and 7 articles of national topic, the total of the articles are 32 articles. The data of this study is the ambiguous words that could be separated in to terms; types and the factors.
One of the types of lexical ambiguity that have been discovered in the articles of The jakarta post, there are 23 data belong to Local Ambiguity, and there are no data found for and global ambiguity. The factors of lexical ambiguity which had been discovered in The jakarta post newspaper articles have 23 data, there are 9 data belong to Polysemy, and 14 data are for Homonymy. The types that found in the data, all of them are local ambiguity, there are so less in global and referential ambiguity. In this case, the local ambiguity becomes the most significant type in the jakarta post newspapers articles, it is because the local ambiguity is the problem which easily make the readers miss lead by it. It happens because the readers have less in meaning in each word in English, so that’s why the local ambiguity is the serious problem for them.
While for the factors of lexical ambiguity, the researcher has found 9 data for the polysemy and 14 data for homonymy which all of them are Homonyms in the jakarta post newspaper articles. In this study, the most numerous of the factors of lexical ambiguity is homonymy, 14 data, it is because the words that is used in the jakarta post newspapers articles have than one meaning, or it can be say that the meaning of the word is out of our knowledge in common. Not like homonymy, polysemy is the least factor than homonymy, it is because polysemy is the factor that some word could have more than meaning but it is still related in the sense. So that’s why it is the least than homonymy.