Exploring Ambiguity Based on the Grammatical Differences between Chinese and English

Natural language is highly ambiguous, i.e. linguistic ambiguity is very common at every level --- phonological, lexical, pragmatic and syntactic. This is true of both English and Chinese. Being two widely different languages, English and Chinese possess distinctive grammatical features. This article explores ambiguity from the perspective of grammatical differences between Chinese and English, and identifies the interesting finding that a syntactically ambiguous expression in one language may be perspicuous when put in the other; in other words, syntactic ambiguity in one language may be avoided when expressed in the other.

Keywords: syntactic ambiguity; grammatical differences; Chinese; English.