| Language is characterized either by preciseness or by fuzziness. Fuzziness and preciseness prove to be one of the inherent characteristics of natural language. Over the years, an increasing number of scholars have become aware that like precise language, fuzzy language is also an effective expression means, playing a significant role in language communication. China started the study on fuzzy theory in the late1970s, with the Primary Exploration on Fuzzy Language presented by Professor Wu Tieping from Beijing Normal University marking the birth of fuzzy linguistics in China. The research scope of fuzzy linguistics comprises the research on phonetics, grammar, and semantics and deeply takes root in the scope of semantics. The subsequent researches diversify their research methods and meanwhile develop their perspective from the pure semantic exploration to pragmatic strategy and discourse construction fields due to the influence of pragmatics and text linguistics. Since1980s, fuzzy language has shifted its research focus to various discourses. Meanwhile, worldwide linguists have carried out multi-layer observation for fuzzy phenomena of practical academic as well as scientific and technological styles besides compiling a large number of works.As one of mass media, news report plays a significant role in social life. As is known to all, the primary focus of news is preciseness, which proves to be the fundamental condition of conveying truth. However, why is fuzzy language allowed to exist? Therefore, comprehensive and in-dept research on fuzzy language in news can provide not only some theoretical significance for the further study of pragmatics, but also realistic value for newsman to achieve communicative intention by correctly using fuzzy language in news. Meanwhile, it can help readers to better understand the journalists’ objective to apply fuzzy language in news. Additionally, this study can guide students to write news in a more decent way to a certain degree besides providing practical significance for college English writing and teaching. This paper, which adopts the methods of theoretical statements and case analysis to explore the pragmatic function of news report in such text from the pragmatic perspective with cooperative principle, politeness principle and adaptation theory as support, combining with the qualitative and the quantitative strategies, analyzes and discusses the use of language in dozens of reports of the significant events around the world in recent years especially in2013. The corpus is derived from the major newspapers websites, including xinhuanet (English edition), Reuters, CNN. Seeing that there are few papers with systematic discussions on this regard, this paper appears to be feasible and meanwhile shows certain theoretical value and practical sense. What’s more, based on the studies of predecessors, this paper explores the fuzzy words in News English in combination with news examples in real life. First, this paper makes pragmatic analysis on fuzzy words in English news by way of fuzzy sets theory, cooperative principle, and politeness principle to prove the necessity of fuzzy words. Finally, it points out that the appropriate application of fuzzy language by newsmen or news media can enhance news credibility, timelines, vividness, and liveliness, as well as avoid certain negative influences. Meanwhile, it also probes into the problems that some newsmen or news media apply fuzzy language as weasel words.This paper is composed of six chapters. Chapter I describes research background and significance of this paper and introduces the framework of this paper. Chapter II expounds news definition, category and features and the definition of fuzzy words, and then summarizes the study made by domestic and overseas researchers about fuzzy words. Afterwards, it analyzes the inevitability of fuzzy phenomenon in news from the subjective and objective perspectives. Chapter III introduces the theoretical foundations of this paper in brief. Chapter IV sums up the positive pragmatic functions of fuzzy words in news from a large amount of online English news and meanwhile points out the negative influences. Chapter V draws a conclusion, summarizing the main findings of this study, describing the analysis on pragmatic function of fuzzy words in English news and research function and inspiration of the study. Additionally, this chapter works out the deficiencies of this study and presents several suggestions for future study. |
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