THESIS PROPOSAL

“An Analysis of Lexical

Ambiguity in Ed Sheeran
Song Albums”
Aisyah Diah Safitri
150511100098

ENGLISH STUDY PROGRAM

DEPARTMENT OF SOCIAL AND CULTURAL SCIENCES
UNIVERSITY OF TRUNOJOYO MADURA
C • Introduction
H
1
A
• Review of Related
P 2 Literature
T
E • Methodology
R
3
I

N
CHAPTER I
T

R 1.1 Background of The Study

O  Language is a medium for interacting with each other.
Through language, people can convey their opinions,
D
ideas and thoughts to others. Sometimes people do
U not get the point of what a speaker says because of
C the ambiguity of the utterances. The ambiguous
words make the listeners confused. It means that
T
sometimes listeners unable to define clearly the
I meaning of words that spoken by the speakers.
O

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 Fromkin (2003: 180) stated, “ambiguity is the
property of having more than one linguistic
meaning”.
 Ulmann (1964:156) divided ambiguity into three
kinds; phonetic, grammatical, and lexical.

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 Lexical ambiguity occurs when a single word
has more than one meaning.

 For example, the word ”head” has two

meaning; (1)part of the body above neck
(2) person in charge of an organization

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 Statement of Research Problem

1. Whatare the types of lexical

ambiguities found in Ed Sheeran song
albums ?

2. What are the factors that cause the

lexical ambiguity to occur in Ed Sheeran
Song albums ?

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 The Objective of Study

1 2 To explain the
To explain
factors that
the types of
cause the
lexical
lexical
ambiguities
ambiguity to
found in Ed
occur in Ed
Sheeran
Sheeran song
song albums
albums.

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 The Significance of Study

Theoretically, this study is very important because it can

increase knowledge and understanding about Semantic
especially Lexical Ambiguity.

Practically, the purpose of this study is to help people in

interpreting the lexical ambiguous that have multiple meaning. The
researcher also hopes this study can be the reference for people
who interest in analysis lexical ambiguity in their research.

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Scope and Limitation
 The scope of this study is Lexical ambiguity. In
addition, this study focuses on types and
factors of the Lexical ambiguity by using
theory of Ullman (1972).
 The limitation of this study is the ambiguous
words in Ed Sheeran song albums.

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 Review of Related Literature

2.1.1 SEMANTIC
 Palmer (1981:1) stated, “semantics is the technical term
used to refer to the study of meaning”. In Addition,
semantics and linguistics are related to each other,
because meaning is part of language, so semantics are
part of linguistics.
2.1.2 MEANING
According to Pei and Gaynor (1954: 133) “Meaning is
the sense or thought content which a word or expression is
intended to convey; the metal image formed in the
consciousness of the hearer of an utterance, or of the
reader of a written word or phrase”
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 AMBIGUITY

According to Sennet (2016) “ambiguity is generally

taken to be a property enjoyed by signs that bear
multiple (legitimate) interpretations”.

Hurford, Heasley, and Smith (2007: 128), “word or

sentence is ambiguous when it has more than one sense.
A sentence is ambiguous if it has two or more
paraphrases which are not themselves paraphrases of
each other”

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 Ullmann (1972) divides the ambiguity into three
kinds :

1) Phonological Ambiguity
Ambiguity in the level of phonological arises from
the second of language uttered. Sometimes
people speak too fast and make other people
feel doubt about the meaning or message of the
utterance, so that people may interpret in many
ways.
Example: I scream ( I skri:m) or Ice cream ( ais krim:m)

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2. Grammatical Ambiguity

 Ambiguity in the level of grammar occurs when

phrase, clause or sentence create ambiguity
because their structure may be interpreted more
than one way. Equal with lexical ambiguity, it may
also arise in the written text such as articles, news,
titles, and other written text.
Example : Indonesians women and children are
trafficked overseas for sexual and labor exploitation.

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3. Lexical Ambiguity

 Lexical ambiguity arises when a single words has

more than one meaning
 Hurford and Heasley (1983: 128) stated that,
“Lexical ambiguity is resulting from the ambiguity
of a word” lexical ambiguity divided to two kinds ,
there are homonymy and polysemy.
 Example : Lisa go to the bank
Ullman (1972) divided the lexical ambiguity
into three types, there are :

1. Global Ambiguity
“Global ambiguity means that the whole sentences
can have more than one interpretation” Ullmann
(1972).
Example :I know more clever man than Daniel
- The first interpretation : I know more clever man than
the clever man that Daniel knows
- The second interpretation: I know more man who are
clever than Daniel

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2. Local Ambiguity
“Local ambiguity means that part of the sentence
can have more than one interpretation, but not the
whole sentence” Ullmann (1972).

Example : They can fish

- The first interpretation : They may or able to fish

- The second interpretation : They put the fish in cans

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3. Referential Ambiguity
According to Ullman (1972) “Refferential Ambiguity
is more than one object is being reffered to by a
noun phrase”. This referential ambiguity occurs
because more than one object becomes a reference

Example : After they finished the exam, the students

and the teachers left

The word they in the example above could be the

students only or teacher only, and or both.

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The factors of lexical ambiguity
 Ullmann (1972) stated that factors of lexical ambiguity are
as follows:
1. Polysemy
Ullman (1972) defines polysemy as a “situation” in which the
same word has two or more different meanings. Polysemy
occurs when the same word may have two or more different
meanings but related sense.

For Example that the author found in the data is : the word
“way” means that (1) How something is done or how it
happens (a lonely way of life ), and the other meaning (2)
Way is a line leading to a place or point.

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2. Homonymy

 Homonymy is a word that has different meanings

but is the same pronunciation or spelling.
 Homonymy is refers to words whose various
definitions are unrelated.
 For Example that the author found in the data is :
“soapbox” means that the place to speech and the
other means soapbox is container for putting soap.

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Homonymy is divided into three kinds, there
are :
1. Homographs : homographs are words that are spelled the
same but have different pronounced and meanings.
Example : Can (kæn) – can (kən) ; produce (prədju:s) –
produce(‘pradju:s)
2. Homophones : homophones are words that sound alike but
have different spelled and meanings.
Example : Buy (baI) – By (baI) ; dear (diə(r)) – deer (diə(r))
3. Homonyms : homonyms are words that spelt and pronounced
alike
Example : Club (kl٨b) (social organization) : Club (kl٨b) ( a
blunt weapon)

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 Previous Studies

The first Previous Study The Second Previous Study

 by Vitria (2016)  Henny (2019)

entitled "The Lexical "The Analysis of Lexical
Ambiguity In The And Structural
Cosmetic Ambiguity in Your
Advertisement" . Letters of The Jakarta
Post" .

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 3.1 METHODOLOGY
 Research Design
The design of this research will use qualitative
method to analyze the data.
Bogdan and Biklen (1982) state “Qualitative
research is descriptive. The data is collected in the
form of words or pictures rather than numbers. The
data include interview transcript, field notes,
photographs, videotapes, personal documents,
memos, and other official records”. In addition,
qualitative method gives analysis descriptively to
explain the data analyzed.

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 Source of Data and Data

Source of Data Data

The source of The data in
data of this this study are
study are the words and
2 song phrases that
albums of Ed contain lexical
Sheeran ambiguity.

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 Research Instrument
 The researcher will use  The study alsouse
herself as key instrument. notebook, flash disk,
The researcher will do Laptop and Oxford
observation about Ed Learner Pocket
Sheeran song albums by Dictionary 4thEdition.
herself. The observation
is doing to know deep of
lexical ambiguity
contained in this albums

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1. The researcher browsing song albums of Ed Sheraan.
2. The researcher collects the data taken from Ed Sheraan
song albums. There are 2 albums and 24 songs of Ed Sheraan.
3. Listening and understanding the lyric and write lyrics that
have been heard
4. Identifying out all the words and phrase containing the
lexical ambiguity as the data.
5. Then, the researcher analyze data that has been found with
lexical ambiguity types and factors into Ullmann theory
(1972).
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E.g. 001/LA/HOM3/Y22/V10
Ain’t got a soapbox
001 : The number of data
 The Type of lexical ambiguity
LA : LA stands for Local Ambiguity
GA: GA stands for Global Ambiguity
RA: RA stands for Referential Ambiguity
 The casual factor of Lexical ambiguity
POL: POL stands for Polysemy
HOM1 : HOM1 stands for Homonymy type one (homophones)
HOM2 : HOM2 stands for Homonymy type two (homograph)
HOM3 : HOM3 stands for Homonymy type three (homonym)
Y17: Year of data release
V22: The number of video which the data taken from
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 Method of Data Analysis

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 REFERENCES
 Andriani, Henny. (2009). The Analysis Of Lexical And Structural Ambiguity In Your Letters of The Jakarta Post. University of
Sumatera Utara.
 Bogdan, R. C., & Biklen, S. K. (1982). Qualitative research for education: An introduction to theory and methods. Boston:
Allyn and Bacon.
 Fromkin, V., Rodman, R., &Hyams, N. M. (2003). An introduction to language. Boston: Thomson/Heinle
 F.L,Whitney. (1960).The Elements of Resert.Asian Eds. Osaka: Overseas Book Co.
 Hurford, R.J. Heasley, B. and Smith, B.M. (2007).Semantic a Coursebook Second Edition. United states of America by
Cambridge University Press, New York.
 Leech, Geoffrey. (1981). Semantics: The study of Meaning. London: Penguin Book.
 Lysons, John. (1996). Linguistic Semantics: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press.
 Miles, M.B, Huberman. (2014). Qualitative Data Analysis A Methods Sourcebook. Sage, London.
 Palmer. F.R. (1981). SemanticSecond Edition. Cambridge, United Kingdom: Cambridge University Press.
 Pei, Mario A, and Frank Gaynor. (1954). A dictionary of linguistics. New York: Philosophical Library.
 Sennet, Adam. (2016). The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. University of California.
 Ullmann, S. (1972). Semantics:An Introduction to the sciences of Meaning. Oxford: Basic Blackwell.
 Vitria, Arizona. (2016). The Lexical Ambiguity in The Cosmetic Advertisements.Sanata Dharma University Yogyakarta.
 Yule, G. (1985). The Study of Language. Cambridge University Press.