CONTRASTIVE ANALYSIS OF LEXICAL AND STRUCTURAL AMBIGUITY BETWEEN HAUSA AND ENGLISH LANGUAGES

Interaction is a cardinal variable in the aspects of people’s lives and the chief vehicle of the interaction is language, being the most satisfying medium of communication with which communicative lacuna is weakened. However, central to their interaction is the meaning embedded in the coded form. People’s attitude towards language use and meaning deduction as conceived in daily interaction is multifaceted. Semantics, being a linguistic branch which studies meaning and formal relations that exist in meaning interpretation of the linguistic forms, has therefore been in daily use among persons, groups inter-alia. The study used both Contextual Theory and Contrastive Analysis to discuss the facts about instances of ambiguity, and tried investigating how semantic resource of ambiguity can be examined in Hausa, using some conversions from English language. It aims again at investigating the ambiguous sentential stretches inherent in both Hausa and English with a comparative overview. It found out that both Hausa and English have instances of ambiguity and some Hausa ambiguous stretches can be unambiguous when converted to English and vice versa. Context can help in the interpretation of speaker-intended meaning in the two languages; in the case(s) of ambiguity and bilingual can disambiguate expressions, not using same language, but another language where necessary to harness communicative efforts. The

researchers are tempted to conclude that ambiguity is a semantic problem which impedes communication understanding in the two languages under study