A Study Of Pragmatic Functions Of Vagueness In English News Reporting

Vagueness occurs frequently in language communication. The explorations of vagueness receive great attention from philosophy, semantics and pragmatics. By employing descriptive and qualitative methods, the present thesis probes into the pragmatic vagueness in news reporting based on the theoretical framework developed by Verschueren's (2000) Adaptation Theory. In the present thesis, the author focuses on a number of selected news materials from the authoritative news websites, newspapers and magazines to seek the answers to the following two questions: (1) How is the realization of vagueness on the lexical level, syntactic level and cross-textual level? (2)What are the reasons that reporters use vague language in news reporting? And what are the pragmatic functions? According to Verschueren's model of three properties of language and four angles of investigation, the thesis investigates vague language in five sample passages chosen from the news websites, covering politics, economics, sports, entertainment, and technology. Through the detailed analyses, it is found that vague language is an effective and appropriate strategy employed by reporters in news reporting, which is made as adaptation to the mental world, namely adapting to the readers'mental world and the reporters'mental world, as well as adaptation to the social world—avoiding'negative effect'on the society, to achieve politeness. Therefore, we can arrive at a conclusion that vague language is a result of both linguistic choice and linguistic adaptation. Vague language has four pragmatic functions in news reporting: (1) giving the right amount of information; (2) increasing creditability; (3) preventing speaking in an absolute way; and (4) protecting from taking responsibilities. The findings of the present study may enrich the research on vague language and provide some hints to reporters and readers, such as to help reporters use vague language more appropriately and tactfully, help readers obtain a better understanding of why reporters employ vague language in news reporting. The study also helps students to learn to write news reporting in a tactful way.