Word order and syntactic ambiguity in the Russian language

Liu Shuang

The article deals with the issue of syntactic ambiguity in the Russian language. The Russian language is characterized by a free word order, which is one of the causes of ambiguity. Ambiguity is not always a negative phenomenon, but in the case of oral communication, as well as all genres of written communication (with the exception of literature), syntactic ambiguity leads to communication failures. In this study, the main attention is paid to identifying aspects of the influence of word order on the ambiguity of an utterance at the syntactic level. Using the methods of syntactic and semantic analysis, systematization and generalization, on the material of the National Corpus of the Russian Language, the author of the study studies the features of word order in various types of syntactic ambiguity, including arrow, marking and constituent. As a result of the study, it was concluded that, depending on the situation, the word order in a sentence is able to solve the problem of ambiguity, allowing you to more accurately interpret the meaning of the sentence, but most often it increases the likelihood of an ambiguous understanding of the meaning of the statement. The use of syntactic analysis allows you to reveal the relationships between the words of the statement, on the basis of which you can make changes to the order of words, contributing to the elimination of ambiguity.

Keywords:syntactic ambiguity, structural homonymy, word order, Russian language, syntactic analysis