AMBIGUITY IN CONVERSATION: THE SITUATION OF SPEAKER-HEARER MEANING MISCONCEPTION IN ASASUL ISLAM SECONDARY SCHOOL OF J.I.B.W.I.S, TUDUN WADA, KEFFI

Often time people interact with one another, and the chief vehicle of their interaction is language being the medium of communication. Central to their interaction is meaning embedded in the coded form. Semantics, which is the branch of linguistics that studies meaning and formal relations that exist in meaning interpretation of the linguistic forms, has therefore been in daily use among persons, groups, communities and nations. However, people’s attitude towards language use and meaning deduction as conceived in daily interaction is multifaceted. The teacher-student conversation as well as student-student conversation, which this study set out to investigate, has been faced with enormous problems. The situation is rather intensified in the cases of foreign learners of English like the Nigeria. Here the concern is on those features of language, which either consciously or subconsciously mar the formal standards of the language in use, as the glaring effect is that which creates ambiguity situations (an aspect of rule violation). The study hence set out to investigate the ambiguous statements inherent in both teacher-student and student-student conversations of the Asasul Islam Secondary School, Keffi. Through observation, personal discussion and eavesdropping, the study gathered its data which were analysed using the contextual model otherwise known as the operational explication of meaning. The results of the analysis showed that ambiguity is a semantic problem which impedes understanding, and hence recommendations were offered on how to avoid unnecessary use of ambiguous expressions