On the Use of Vague Language in English Journalism英语专业毕业论文

On the Use of Vague Language in English Journalism Abstract: Vagueness is an essential feature of human language, and it is also an important characteristic of human psychology. As a linguistic concept together with a linguistic phenomenon, vague language embodies the uncertainty of the language at its extension, News is generally believed to be accurate, brief and clear, however, such uncertainty is often set against the authenticity and accuracy of the news. In fact, in spite of this particular feature, news reports are found to possess the nature of being vague as well, which seems to show that news reports are not exceptions of natural language. Applying descriptive and qualitative methods, the thesis being studied probes into the functions of vague language in news report on the basis of the theoretical framework of Fairclough s Critical Discourse Analysis, The analysis is conducted by a number of news materials selected from the official and well-known newspaper and news websites, seeking to demonstrate the necessity and importance of vague language in English news and its pragmatic functions within the theoretical framework. The aim of this paper is to illustrate that the usage of vague language in news is unavoidable and its appropriate and accurate use can help to improve the quality of news reporting.Key words: vague language; functions; news reporting 摘要：模糊性是人类语言和人类心理的一个重要特征，模糊语言是一种语言概念，同时又是一种语言现象，它反映了客观事物在外延上的一种不确定性。根据新闻报道的特征，新闻报道应遵循三项原则，即：内容准确，语言简洁，句子清晰。在新闻报道中，很多人往往把这种不确定性与新闻的真实性和准确性对立起来。事实上，英语新闻语篇作为一种特殊文体虽有其自身特点，但作为自然语言，无疑要遵循自然语言的规律，不会与其相悖的。本文主要运用定性和描述分析的方法，借助批判性语篇分析对新闻报道中模糊语言的语用功能进行分析和研究。通过分析收集到的一些众所周知的官方报纸和新闻网站上的英语新闻报道，来说明模糊语言在英语新闻中的必要性和重要性，并阐述模糊语言在理论框架中所体现的语用功能，只有使用得恰当，准确，才有助于提高新闻报道的质量。 关键词：模糊语言；功能；新闻报道。IntroductionVagueness and precision are the two basic elements in language. However, many people attach much importance to precision, while ignoring the vagueness for a long time, for they believed that vagueness and imprecision are to be avoided in human language. It did not arouse much interest until the beginning of 20th century. The famous English scholar B. Russell pointed out the vagueness phenomenon in a paper entitled Vagueness, indicating that language is more or less vague. Later, it was the American well-known mathematician L.A.Zadeh, a professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics Research Laboratory, University of California, who published the paper “Fuzzy sets” in 1965 on Information and Control that laid the fundamental ground of the fuzziness study. From then on, people began to lay much emphasis on the fuzziness study and therefore fuzzy linguistics develops very rapidly. It combines with many other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, psychology, logic, etc, thus resulting in a number of new subjects about fuzziness.It appears to have two contradictory views about vagueness: one holds that language is a bad thing due to the possibility of leading to misunderstanding; the other holds that it is a good thing because of its flexibility brought to communication. We agree with Channell that “Vagueness in language is neither all bad nor all good. What matter is that vague language is used appropriately.” ( Channel, 2000:3)In fact, vagueness has become an interesting area of research for many scholars and researchers, who have explored it different perspectives, such as philosophy, semantics, psychology and pragmatics. However, little attention has been paid to the vagueness in news. Based on the theory of linguistic adaptation (Verschueren, 2000), the present study attempts to describe vague language in news from a pragmatic perspective.This research attempts to explore the employment of vague language in news and its pragmatic functions. To be specific, this present study seeks to answer the following questions:1) What are the main lexical linguistic realization devices of vagueness in news?2) Why do reporters use vague language in news?This thesis is enriched by the following methods to manifest the detailed analyzing of vague language, especially hedges, in English news. The present study uses qualitative methods to research the application and functions of vague language in English news, such as description, deduction, induction, enumerating and exemplifying.The data collected in the study are various news reports selected from some authorized newspapers and news websites both at home and abroad. These newspapers and websites are chosen as representative ones, which are so widely read and influenced. With a view to these respects, the United States, the Great Britain and China news fields are respectively chosen, that is The New York Times, The Observer and China Daily. News in such newspaper is believed internationally, authoritatively and mainstream. The data analyzed here are extracted mainly from the articles about politics, economics, society , technology, sports and entertainment.This thesis consists of three chapters, namely, Literature Review, the pragmatic analysis and the advantages and disadvantages of fuzziness.Chapter One is the study of vague language. It explains vague language, its definition and the factors causing vague language; and hedges-the core of vague language.Chapter Two is the pragmatic analysis of vagueness in English news. In this part the thesis comes to its focus that is the investigation of English news with vague language. Chapter Three is the analysis of the advantages and disadvantages of fuzziness use in news. Then follows the conclusion which summarizes the main points as well as the results, and points out the limitations and some suggestions for further study.Chapter 1 An Overview of Vague Language It should be generally acknowledged that vagueness in language is a common phenomenon in communication. However, little attention was paid to it until philosopher Peirce (1902), the originator of the nation of vagueness in language, showed his interest in natural language. In this chapter, we will trace back to the previous studies related to the vagueness phenomenon. Firstly, a number of terms related to our research will be explained and clarified, such as vagueness, ambiguity, fuzziness and generality; secondly, the introduction to the hedges and hedging will be carried out; finally, approaches to the study of vague language both abroad and home will be introduced.1.1 The Definition of Vague LanguageThere is no generally agreed definition for the term of vague language and different researchers have different ideas about what vague language is concerned. One reason is that vague language itself is vague. However, the present study needs to define the research object and has its own definition of vague language since it is not intending to be all-inclusive.H. P. Grice also offers a definition for vagueness: to say that an expression in vague( in a broad sense of vagueness) is presumably, roughly speaking, to say that there are cases (actual or possible) in which one just dose not know whether to apply the expression or to withhold it and one s not knowing is not due to ignorance of the facts. (H .P .Grice, 1975) Grice s definition is a broader one: it applies to what we call pragmatic vagueness as well as semantic vagueness. Not knowing whether to apply the expression can mean (a) not knowing whether applying a statement would be true, or(b) not knowing whether it would be appropriate in the circumstances to make such a statement. Black (1937) brings forward a more concrete definition of fuzziness. In his view “fuzziness” is a label for the phenomenon of borderline cases. An expression or a concept is vague or fuzzy if and only if it has borderline cases. An expression or a concept is vague or fuzzy if and only if it has borderline cases, that is, actual or potential cases in which it neither clearly applies nor clearly fails to apply.It is widely acknowledged that vagueness of human languages shows itself most prominent in words and their meanings. Then how did these words, or so-called vague items, come into being? In fact, there have been kinds of views on the origin of vagueness, and still no firm agreement on it has been reached. According to Chen Weizhen and Wu Shixiong (2002), these views can be summarized as follows; (1) The vagueness of language symbol is originated from the vagueness of things and events; (2) Vagueness is caused by the cognitive limitation of human being; (3) Vagueness is a basic attribute of language symbol. Wu Shixiong (1996) assumes that “the fuzziness of language arises from the process of human s cognition”. (In other parts of this thesis, “vagueness” and “fuzziness” have the same meaning and denotation.)The present study tries to put forward the definition of vague language as follows, based on the definition of Channell (2000) and Zhang Qiao (1998):An expression or a word is vague, if：(1) It has more than one possible interpretation and no definite meaning can be derived; (2) It is intentionally vague to be used to achieve certain communicative intention.It can be seen that there are no consistent opinions about the definition of vague language, however, such definitions put forward by the influential linguists actually have something in common and make great sense. Vagueness is typical of human language, and vague language diversifies human being s mind and language expressions.1.2 The Distinction between Vagueness and Some Similar TermsIn fact, there is no unified opinion on the differences between the four linguistic concepts of vagueness, fuzziness, generality and ambiguity. Though much effort and research has been done on the matter, it is still not clear how to distinguish these four similar concepts and there is a great diversity among linguists in defining them, which share the same characteristic of indeterminacy and conveying imprecise information.1.2.1 Vagueness and FuzzinessStrictly speaking, fuzziness is distinct from vagueness, however, vagueness and fuzziness have been used interchangeably by some researchers. In an effort to distinguish fuzziness from other terms, Crystal defines fuzziness as a term derived from mathematics and used by some linguistic unit or pattern. However, it seems that this definition is too general for these four terms sharing the same characteristicthat is indeterminacy. Zhang Qiao holds that “an expression is fuzzy if it has a characteristic of referential opacity, or has an uncertain extensional denotation”. This definition agrees with our understanding of fuzziness. We take an expression as fuzzy only if it lacks a borderline when its meaning is considered. When it comes to the vagueness, there are also various definitions. Zhang Qiao maintains that an expression is vague if it has more than one possible interpretation. However, his definition itself is rather vague, which may be easily confused with other terms. Comparatively speaking, Kempson s explanation is closer to our understanding and better illustrated. She divides vagueness into the following four types:a) Referential vagueness, where the meaning of lexical item is it in principle clear enough, but it may be hard to decide whether or not the item can be applied to certain objects;b) Indeterminacy of meaning, where the meaning of item itself seems indeterminate;c) Lack of specification in the meaning of an item, where the meaning is clear but is only generally specified;d) Disjunction in the specification of an item s meaning, where the meaning involves an either-or statement with different interpretation possibilities.Actually, fuzziness differs from vagueness in that it is not simply a list of possible related interpretation derived from a vague expression. A fuzzy expression is defined as an expression which has no clear-cut referential boundary. In contrast to fuzziness, a vague expression is defined as an expression which has more than one interpretation, and the question of whether or not these interpretations have a clear-cut boundary is simply irrelevant. Fuzziness is inherent in the sense that it has no clear-cut referential boundary and is not resolved with resort to context, as opposed to vagueness, which may be contextually eliminated.1.2.2 Vagueness and AmbiguityCompared with other terms, ambiguity has a more established definition, though some people often use ambiguous examples to explain vagueness. Ambiguity is an expression with more than one competing but distinct meaning, while for vagueness, distinct meaning cannot be identified. Vagueness is characteristic of a single meaning that has borderline cases. Taking truth conditions as the standard, Kempson regards a sentence as ambiguous if it is true in quite different circumstances, that is to say, a sentence is ambiguous if it is simultaneously true and false, relative to the same state of affairs. Zhang Qiao defines ambiguity as “expression which have more than one semantically unrelated meaning; in other words, an expression is ambiguous if it has several paraphrases which are not paraphrases of each other.” For instance: The shooting of hunters was terrible. Here we can t tell whether this means the fact that the hunters were shot was terrible or the way in which the hunters shot was terrible. Thus, this sentence is ambiguous since “the shooting of human” has two paraphrases which are not paraphrases of each other. Therefore, if a phrase or sentence has two interpretations when the context is not specified, it is ambiguous and this language phenomenon is ambiguity. However, ambiguity is different from polysemy. Polysemy refers to words which have more than one meaning. But polysemous words are sources of ambiguity. Ambiguity is rare in actual texts, because contextual clues generally make clear which meaning is appropriate, but vagueness is possible in many cases because it expresses one meaning which is not clear or distinct.1.2.3 Vagueness and Generality Vagueness and generality are two different terms. As for generality, Zhang Qiao argues that “the meaning of an expression is general in the sense that it dose not specify certain details; i.e. generality is a matter of unspecification.” For example, the meaning of “flower” is general because it does not specify whether the flower is daisy or lily, or whether or not the flower is red or white. In our opinion, if generality is equal to unspecification, it would be difficult to draw a demarcation line between generality and fuzziness. For this reason, generality is considered in our terms as follows: an expression is general if it is the superordinate to other relevant expressions, which are considered as its hyponyms.1.3 The Core of Vague Language-HedgeHedge, which closely interrelated with the phenomenon of vague language, is an important researching object of linguistics. The designation “hedge” itself was first introduced by G. Lakoff in his article “Hedge: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts” (Lakoff. 1972). Lakoff defines “hedges” as words whose function is to make things fuzzier and less fuzzy.There are four categories of hedge according to Zedeh:(1) Words with suffixes such as ish, -likely, -ly, etc.(2) Some adjectives and adverbs such as sort of, a little bit, maybe, often, usually, always, quite, very, almost, some, somewhere, recently, somewhat, etc.(3) Phrases such as as if, so that, as though, so as to, etc. These phrases show the speakers uncertainty about what he said.(4) Sentences such as I think, I guess, I wonder, As far as, I can tell, etc. These sentences can help the speaker to express himself more indirectly and more politely. Four reasons listed by Crystal and Davy (1975) explain speakers selection of hedges: (1) memory loss- the speaker forgets the correct word; (2) the language has no suitable exact word, or the speaker dose not know it; (3) the subject of the conversation is not such that it requires precision, and an approximation or characterization will do, and (4) the choice of a vague item is deliberate to maintain the atmosphere, when precision is not of primary concern. Therefore, hedges cannot be simply evaluated with either the term “good” or “bad”. The matter concerned is that whether they can be used appropriately and how to use them in place so as to achieve the goal of appropriate expression and successful communication. As the core of vague language, hedge widely exists in human s communication and constitutes the main part of vague language. The most important thing lies in that its hedging device can function as pragmatic strategies to achieve communicative purpose, which is to be illustrated in the following chapters.1.4 Factors Causing Vague LanguageVagueness of language involves two sides-objective, that is, language system and the outside world are internal and external factors that cause the vagueness in language.1.4.1 Psychological FactorsThe distance between man s cognition and the objective world is the fundamental cause of the vagueness of language. To be more exact, the phenomenon of vagueness occurs in the process of cognition and communication because of the distance between mind and the outside world; cognition subject and cognitive object; thought, emotion and expression; intension and expression; expression and interpretation, etc. Human brain responding to the objective world is not like a mirror. The process of reflection is dynamic and full of subjective elements. Man s choice of the objective and ways of observing are marked with subjectivity. The picture of the objective world consists of universal contacting and interacting elements. The objective world and man s physical and psychological factors are forever changing and developing, and are constantly affected by other internal and external factors. So even though human mind can “faithfully” reflect a certain phenomenon, it is for a certain moment. The systematic transformation from concepts to linguistic symbols is a complex and subtle process of rationalization, during which vague expressions are produced. In real communication, the interpretation of an utterance depends largely on context. One of the factors affecting semantic interpretation is communicator s psychological factor such as personal characters: extrovert or introvert, warm or cold, resolute or hesitant, optimistic or pessimistic. One s attitude towards life may determine his choice of vague language instead of explicit language. One more point is that extension of semantic meaning caused by psychological factors is mainly realized by means of metaphor, metonymy, euphemism and hyperbole. The reason for the adaptation of these means is that there are some thing in life that should be stated bluntly or truthfully and that there are times when it is necessary, even wise, not to “call a spider a spider” but to use some better-sounding names or expressions and to deliberately avoid mentioning directly for the purpose of disguise by using a false word or for fear of hurting other people s feelings or even for fear of losing face.1.4.2 Internal Factors of LanguageFirst, language, as a means of human communication, is a system of arbitrary vocal symbols. The bond between the signifier and the signified is arbitrary. This also means that the linguistic sign is arbitrary.Second, the vagueness of language is directly from the complexity, unity and dynamic feature of language system. There exists indeterminacy of boundaries in the classification of linguistic structure level and linguistic units.Ullmann (1962) in a section entitled “words with blurred edges” traced from Plato to Byron a recurrent feeling of the inadequacy of language to express thought, particularly because of its lack of precision. He noted also the converse feeling among poets and creative writers that such vagueness is in fact an advanta