Pragmatic Vagueness In English Tour Itinerary From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Tour itinerary is not only an important reference for tourists to involve in group traveling, but also is a major source for travel agency to achieve the communicative purpose—gaining profit and reputation. Vague language is a universal phenomenon in verbal communication; pragmatic vagueness is an essential ingredient in vague language. Based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the paper focuses on the usage of pragmatic vagueness and tries to analyze the following three questions:1.How can Adaptation Theory explain PV in tour itinerary?2. What are the characteristics and effects of pragmatic vagueness in tour itinerary?3. Why travel agencies use pragmatic vagueness in tour itinerary?According to He Ziran’s definition and classification, this paper randomly selects fifty English tour itineraries from United States, England, Scotland, Singapore, a total of11foreign and domestic travel websites, and carries out a qualitative and quantitative analysis. Then, according to the framework of Adaptation Theory and research object concerning about pragmatic vagueness, this paper studies the characteristic of pragmatic vagueness which achieve contextual correlates of adaptability and structural objects of adaptability in tour itineraries.Through analyzing and calculating, the conclusions can be given as below:first, pragmatic vagueness which is used in tour itinerary is a result of the dynamic process of linguistic choices. Second, tour itineraries realize pragmatic vagueness more frequently in contextual correlates of adaptability than structural objects of adaptability. Third, the influences of pragmatic vagueness in tour itinerary have both positive and negative effects. The positive effects can strengthen the flexibility and appropriateness of language usage while the negative effects may misguide tourists and affect travel agency’s reputation and economic benefit.The innovation of this paper is that there are relatively few scholars who involve in the research about tour itinerary text. Therefore, this paper relatively broadens the combination research scope of text analysis and Adaptation Theory. Meanwhile, this paper provides a new pragmatic perspective for further discourse analysis.