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This study is an investigation of syntactic ambiguity in Thai. Based on approximately 80 pages of Thai texts from four registers, namely legal register, MANUSYA: Journal of Humanities, Special Issue No.21, 2015 30 political register, media register, and academic register, the study aims to analyze syntactic patterns that induce ambiguity, and to find out which patterns create the most ambiguities and in which registers. Also, devices to avoid such ambiguities are proposed. The analysis reveals that there are four types of syntactic patterns involving ambiguities: (1) modification construction, (2) coordination construction, (3) modification+coordination construction, and (4) anaphora. The results of the quantitative analysis show that modification construction accounts for more than half of all ambiguities in the study, followed by the modification+coordination construction, coordination construction, and anaphora construction, respectively. Compared across registers, it is found that the media register carries the most ambiguities, followed by the legal register, political register, and academic register, respectively. To avoid ambiguity, revisions of text are proposed. Ambiguous attachment sites of modifiers can be prevented by constituent reordering and nominal clauses. For the coordination construction, the subject of each of the verbal conjoins should be overt , and coordinators should be consistent for a series of items. In some cases, selected disambiguating materials would also be useful. Either a conjoinswitching technique or the provision of modifiers to both or all conjoined heads would clarify ambiguous modification+coordination constructions. When anaphoric ambiguity is potential, preferred is the repeated use of a word or phrase. Introduction Language is a symbolic system by means of which humans communicate with each other. To achieve this communicative purpose, it is argued that language should be ultimately clear and precise. However, this is rarely the case since ambiguity does not only exist but is also pervasive in human language. The question of why language is so ambiguous allows for many plausible answers. Zipf (1949), in his Principle of Least Effort, reasons that ambiguity is a result of a compromise between the least effort on the part of the speaker and on the part of the listener. Cohen (2006) claims that language is a naturally-evolving system with a high degree of complexity, so it is inevitably highly ambiguous. This ambiguous nature of human language was not noticeable until it was brought into view a few decades ago thanks to the advent of the computer and the emergence of computational linguistics discipline. Martin et al (1987 cited in Wasow et al 2005, 266) reported the surprising number of 455 possible parses assigned by their system to the simple sentence List sales of the products produced in 1973 with the products produced in 1972. This number is astonishingly large. Although Grice stated in one of his maxims under the category of manner that seek participants in communicative act to “avoid ambiguity”, Wasow in a series of articles (2002, 2005, and forthcoming) and Arnold et al (2004) argue that people do not actually attempt to avoid ambiguity as much as expected, and that, as a result, ambiguity persists in language. In resolving language ambiguity, Cohen (2006) asserts that humans are unlike machines because they can rely mostly on their power of inference with the help of Syntactic Ambiguity in Legal, Political, Media, and Academic Registers of Thai 31 context and extra-linguistic knowledge. Nevertheless, this disambiguating mechanism is far from perfect. Ambiguity still occurs and often leads to in efficient communication, causing misunderstandings, and even disputes, between writer and reader or among readers. That the reader is not certain whether his/her interpretation of a statement corresponds to that intended by the writer can pose significant problems. The case is even worse when the reader’s interpreted meaning turns out to be different from what the writer intends. The consequences can be catastrophic when uncertainties or misunderstandings occur in the interpretation of an expression in any discourse bearing on the lives of all citizens in a society. Legal, political, media, and academic registers exemplify such influential discourse.

Syntactic Ambiguity in Legal, Political, Media, and Academic Registers of Thai: Patterns and Avoidance