Pragmatic Functions Of Vague Adverbs In Daily Conversations

Generally speaking, the expressions should be brief and precise withoutobscurity when people are using language. However, the informality of the dailyconversations results in the wide use of vagueness in everyday communication.Vagueness is one of the crucial features of natural language, which means that asubject or a concept whose core meanings are precise does not have definiteboundaries.It has been long since people had noticed “vagueness”. After the Greekphilosopher Eubulides had initiated “Sorites Paradox” to deal with the idea ofvagueness in the4thcentury B.C., more and more attention began to be drawn tovagueness in language. However, it was the proposition of “Fuzzy Sets Theory” thatstarted the following studies on linguistic vagueness. The American cyberneticsprofessor L.A. Zadeh published a paper named “Fuzzy Sets Theory” in which theconcept of fuzziness and theory of fuzziness were proposed for the first time in1965.Zadeh pointed out that most categories we met in the real world were fuzzy. After theoccurrence of fuzzy theory, it had been applied to every field. In the area of linguistic,a large amount of linguists have combined vagueness with semantics, phonology,social linguistics and pragmatics, etc.In the part of literature review, this thesis first reviews the relative studies ofvague language at home and abroad, which includes the studies of the definition ofvague language and the classification of vague expressions. Second, this thesisreviews the studies of pragmatic vagueness. The Australia linguist Burns (1991) firstexplored vague language from a pragmatic perspective. She pointed out that thepragmatic factors must be taken into consideration to explain vague language whichcan not be explored only from the semantic position. Whether a statement is vague ornot depends on the context and the hearer’s expectations. And then, this paperdemonstrates foreign linguist Thomas’ and Chinese linguist He Ziran’s different classifications of pragmatic vagueness. Finally, this thesis reviews the domestic andforeign researches of vagueness in daily conversations and their major fruits.However, in the process of reviewing, it is found that the previous studies ofvagueness in daily communication are mostly general conclusions on all vagueexpressions or hedges; hence, this thesis creatively pays specific attention to vagueadverbs which are one kind of vague expressions and analyzes the pragmaticfunctions they perform in daily conversations. Vague adverbs include those adverbswhich contain vague meaning themselves, such as “somewhere”,“sometime” and“approximately”, etc. and the adverbs which do not have vague meaning but are ableto make what they modify vague, like “kinda (kind of)”,“pretty”, and “somewhat” etc.The previous studies have shown that vague expressions are often used in dailyconversations, but the use of vague adverbs has not been explored, and therefore, thisthesis proposes two questions:1) How and what kind of vague adverbs appear in daily conversations?2) What pragmatic functions do the vague adverbs perform in dailyconversations?In order to answer the two questions, this thesis chooses the real dialogues of theprevious4seasons with87episodes of the popular American sitcom The Big BangTheory (TBBT) as the language data. It tells a story about a young American girlPenny, her two scientist neighbors Sheldon and Leonard, as well as their other twoscientist friends Howard and Rajesh. The reason why this show is chosen as thefoundation of the corpus lies in the special language which features humor, fun,and great number of vagueness used.First, this thesis classifies the types of vague adverbs which appear in dailyconversations based on the analysis of the corpus. According to the analysis, there arefive types of vague adverbs highly frequently used in daily conversations: vagueadverbs of degree which refer to the adverbs that do not contain vague meaning butare used to change the speaker’s tone or the degree of an utterance, like “almost”,“somewhat”,“fairly” and “extremely”, etc.; vague adverbs of approximation whichare used before number words, like “about”,“around” and “approximately”, etc.; vague adverbs of possibility which express the uncertainty of possibility, like“possibly”,“perhaps” and “probably”, etc.; vague adverbs of frequency, namely“usually”,“seldom”,“rarely”, etc. as well as vague adverbs of time and place, such as“someplace”,“someday” and “sometime”, etc. And then with the assist of SPSS, theproportion of each vague adverb is calculated. It is found that vague adverbs of degreeare most frequently used while vague adverbs of time are least frequently used ineveryday conversations.Second, after the classification of vague adverbs, this thesis analyzes thefunctions of those vague adverbs appearing in daily conversations under the framework of the pragmatic theories Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. Theresult is that the use of vague adverbs violates some maxims of the CP but to observesome maxims of the PP, vice versa. The thesis then concludes that there are fivefunctions which are often performed by the vague adverbs in daily conversations:being polite, being euphemistic, bridging information gaps, deliberately withholdinginformation and self-protection. The same type of vague adverbs will play differentfunctions for different purposes.Certainly, the inappropriate use of vague expressions will lead to some negativeeffect; as a result, it is quite necessary for English educators to master the knowledgeof vagueness. With the penetration of English in China, it is more and more importantto learn how to apply English in practice. Since vagueness is a useful device for dailycommunication, the author of this thesis wishes the study of vague adverbs couldmake contribution to the improvement of the English level of Chinese learners tosome extent. However, since the corpus of this thesis could not be objective andall-around enough to some extent, the data calculated and the conclusion drawn willhave some limitations in turn. And hence, the author of this thesis will continue to dosome other analyses about this subject in the future, in order to perfect the vaguelanguage’s development in pragmatics and the teaching of the second language.