ELLIPSIS AND AMBIGUITY FOUND IN THE TWEETS ON TWITTER

The objectives of this qualitative research were to describe (1) the types of ellipsis found in the tweets on twitter, (2) the types of ambiguity found in the tweets on twitter, and (3) how are the tweets on twitter realized as ellipsis. The tweets in this research were written in English. The data of the research were 100 tweets typed by twitter users, taken from www.twitter.com in February 2014. Descriptive method was used to analyze the data. The research findings show that (1) types of ellipsis found in the tweets on twitter were three types, namely: nominal, verbal and clausal, (2) there were three types of ambiguity found in the elliptical tweets on twitter, they were 3 Lexical ambiguity, 9 Structural ambiguity and 15 Referential ambiguity, and (3) It is realized that there was 30% elliptical tweets on twitter consist of 12% Nominal, 10% Verbal and 8% Clausal ellipsis which were explained by using Halliday and Hasans theory. Nominal ellipsis has high frequency in tweets on twitter, it means that in sharing their feelings, idea, and comments twitter users mostly type the tweets by omitting the repetition of nominal element. Referential ambiguity also has high frequency in the tweets. It means that twitter users mostly type the tweets by using unclear referring expression, it was unclear for the readers that to whom the words or expression refer to. Finally, the findings of this study can be used for twitter followers to help overcome the difficulties in interpreting tweets containing ellipsis and ambiguity. Moreover, the findings of this study are expected to be useful for further researchers as reference to conduct in-depth research about linguistic development in social media.