Talk Show Pragmatic Vagueness

Based on the verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the thesis studies the pragmatic vagueness in interview program on CCTV-2 named "Dialogue",and analyzes its pragmatic function in interview program, the motives behind the employment of the vehicle of vagueness is also analysed. Utters adopt pragmatic vagueness as a communicative strategy to achieve certain communicative goals. The purpose of this paper is to draw people's attention to the application of vagueness and equip people with better manipulation of vagueness in interview program.Verschueren studies linguistic phenomena from the pragmatic perspective, he explains the idea of pragmatics as a general functional perspective on language which takes into account the full complexity of its cognitive, social and cultural functioning. Based on his primary observations, he puts forward the Linguistic Adaptation Theory.The main contents of his Linguistic Adaptation Theory are: (l)using language consists in the continuous making of linguistic choices(both in speaking and interpreting; (2) This making of choices can be understood in terms of and three hierarchically related notions: variability, negotiability and adaptability, make the process possible; (3) the concept of adaptability demonstrates the four aspects of the meaningful functioning of language, include contextual correlates of adaptability,structural objects of adaptability, the dynamics of adaptability, and the salience of adaptation process.According to Adaptation Theory, the paper consists five chapters,carrying out ,with a qualitative method, the variability, adaptability and functions of pragmatic vagueness analysis of interview program named "Dialogue".The interview program is a unique kind of program that has been adopted widely in TV news industry. "Dialogue" as the research target, is an opinion seeking authority of information as characteristics,conversations between the interviewer and interviewees as a form.To research such a popular kind of interview program aims at contributing to the analysis of pragmatic vagueness.It begins with introduction of research orientation, aims and significance,research method,data delimitation and collection and other relevant information in need, including a literature review of pragmatic vagueness and the theoretical framework of this thesis which consists of the presentation of LAT, background,central concept. The main part of this paper starts from chapter 2 to chapter 4, and in these chapters the main research is arranged encircling two questions: (1) What linguistic devices or manipulations are adopted to acquire the communicative strategy of pragmatic vagueness in interview program?(2)How to adapt to different non-linguistic contextual correlates such as mental world,social world and physical world in interview program? In interview program, utters adopt the communicative strategy of pragmatic vagueness to obtain certain communicative needs.All the linguistic choices are more or less instructed and regulated by the addressor's metapragmatic awareness. As a communicative strategy, in interview program, pragmatic vagueness is a kind of linguistic choice by the utter with the motivation of communicative purpose to some extent, and it reveals the utter's much higher metapragmatic awareness. As the indicator of metapragmatic awareness, pragmatic vagueness can be carried out at the lexical and syntactic level.In conclusion,summarized are major findings,value of implication, and some limitations existing in the paper due to a limited knowledge capacity of the author,to which some suggestions are given for the future perfection of this research.