Analysis Of Ambiguity In Cnn International Online News Headlines Using Semantic And Syntactic Approaches

Ambiguity is a phenomenon that occurs in verbal language elements such as word and sentence. Such cases often happen in daily life in many forms such as online news media, like in this case, CNN online news. By using qualitativedescriptive analysis method, the writer describes the corpus with related study of ambiguity by Ullman and Kreidler theories. Purpose of this research is to identify, analyze, and prove any ambiguous headlines in CNN online news. The data are collected using bibliography technique, that is looking up, gathering, and selecting 20 headlins randomly from news articles that published in June and July 2015 to be selected as research object. Through his analysis, the writer found that CNN has 11 lexically ambigous headlines and 9 syntactically ambiguous headlines. In lexically ambiguous headlines 6 are polysemous case and 5 are homonymous case. Meanwhile, in syntactically ambiguous headlines 7 are in surface structure case and 2 in deep structure case. It is also found that all ambiguous headlines areintrepreted in two ways. The research also reveals that from 20 headlines, 17 of them can be interpreted into two ways, and 3 headlines can be interpreted into three ways. Thus, this research proved that CNN online news possess ambiguous headlines in their June and July 2015 publicationsviii, 49 p.: ill