Syntactic ambiguity of (complex) nominal groups in technical English

Abstract

Complex nominal groups are common in technical English (i.e. English for Specific Purposes, ESP) as they allow lexical items to be tightly packed into a clause. This leads to increased lexical density and syntactic ambiguity.
 In this paper we analyze (complex) nominal groups in technical English, assuming that it is not only the context and extralinguistic knowledge (i.e. shared technical background that the ESP teacher does not necessarily possess) that help solve the syntactic ambiguity, but that the structure of the nominal group, or more precisely the position of modifiers within the group can help disambiguate the meaning. Thus, modifiers standing farthest from the head have the least specifying potential and are followed by those which restrict the meaning of the entire nominal group. In the example steam reciprocating engine (vs.*reciprocating steam engine) the participle reciprocating has a more specific meaning and is thus closer to the head of the nominal group.
 The results show how the type of modification (linear or non-linear) can help disambiguate complex nominal groups. The main contribution of the paper is to help the ESP teacher, who is not a specialist in the field of (marine) engineering, process, understand and successfully teach complex nominal groups.

Lexical Analysis of Nautical and Marine Engineering Corpora: Similar or Different Lexicographic Results

“…ME vocabulary covers the vital language of written documents dealing with ship construction, engineering, surveillance, maintenance and the operation of ships. The proper interpretation of such a specialised vocabulary requires extra-linguistic knowledge or, more simply, knowledge of the field (Borucinsky and Kegalj 2019). With this in mind, Đurović (2021) extracted and analysed a marine engineering frequency word list from the corpus of marine engineering instruction books and manuals.…”

“…In addition, corpus selection also provides for retrieving illustrative contextual examples and cross-referencing among sub-corpora. The metalanguage built this way is very convenient for technical dictionaries, given their dense and often complicated nominal groups, which can often be ambiguous when they are not placed in a wider context (Borucinsky and Kegalj 2019;Čulić-Viskota and Rummel 2022).…”

“…Interestingly again, the corpus of Nautical books shows even lower coverage by GE vocabulary, since 95% coverage is reached at the level of 14,000 GE words. We can assume that this is the case because Marine Engineering is a branch of engineering that shares many discursive aspects with general engineering discourse (Borucinsky and Kegalj 2019;Bocanegra-Valle 2013), which makes it more multidisciplinary and more familiar to a wider range of English speakers. Furthermore, Nautical English can be considered the most technical in terms of the Maritime sciences.…”