THE ANALYSIS OF AMBIGUITY IN RACHEL LIPPINCOTT’S NOVEL “FIVE FEET APART”

Abstract

Ambiguity occurs when both words and sentences have more than one meaning. If it occurs in the level of word it is called lexical ambiguity and if it occurs when a reader can draw different meanings from an embedded phrase or clause inside a sentence it is syntactical ambiguity. The objectives of this research are to find out the lexical and syntactical ambiguities found in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, to find out the most dominant causal factors of ambiguities appeared in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, and to describe how the lexical and syntactic ambiguities appeared in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”. The scope of this research is semantics as the study of word meaning and sentence meaning. Meanwhile, the researcher limits the study on lexical and syntactical ambiguities appeared in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart” as well as the causal factors of the ambiguities. The results of the research are there are seven types of lexical ambiguity appeared in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”; they are Polysemy, Homonymy, Synonym, Hyponymy, Antonym, Redundancy, and Part of speech. Meanwhile there are six types of syntactical ambiguity appeared in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”; they are Personal pronoun, Adjective, Noun, Preposition, Verb and Adverb. Redundancy ambiguity is the most dominant lexical ambiguity in which there are 20 out of 67 data or 29.85%. Meanwhile personal pronoun is the most dominant syntactical ambiguity in which there are 24 out of 46 data or 52.17%. There are two ways how the writer used lexical ambiguity in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”. First, the writer repeated the words to insist the readers that everything is the same. Second, the writer made sure the readers what the writer described. Meanwhile, in syntactical ambiguity, the researcher found that in Rachel Lippincott‟s Novel “Five Feet Apart”, the writer often missed the subject pronoun in the novel.