Pragmatic Vagueness In Diplomatic Language From The Perspective Of The Relevance-Adaptation Model

As one of inherent linguistic attributes, vagueness is widely used in our daily communication. With the help of vague language, we can express our true intentions implicitly rather than offending others. In terms of this aspect, pragmatic vagueness occurs. For a long time, much progress on pragmatic vagueness has been mainly made in the areas of novels, poetry, drama and advertisements. Nevertheless, relatively limited work has been carried out in the diplomatic language. Characterized by constructive vagueness and guarded understatement, diplomatic language is a formal, conservative, persuasive and cautious language. Hence, its distinctiveness lies in that it gives much priority to euphemism, implicitness, decency and politeness which are mainly achieved by vague language.Generally speaking, previous studies on pragmatic vagueness in diplomatic language have been chiefly connected with Cooperative Principle, Polite Principle, Face Theory and Adaptation Theory. Almost few studies tends to be conducted from the perspective of the Relevance-Adaptation Model. Hence, the focus of this paper is on the use of pragmatic vagueness in the setting of the People’s Republic of China Foreign Ministry press conference as an intentional communicative strategy.Taking the Relevance-Adaptation Model as its theoretical framework, this paper adopts a qualitative and quantitative method to analyze the use of pragmatic vagueness from the data collected from the spokesperson’s remarks in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the PRC. The paper begins with relevant research on vagueness and pragmatic vagueness and makes respective estimation. Then the theoretical framework-the Relevance-Adaptation Model is given. As this model is based on the Relevance Theory and the Adaptation Theory, there is a necessity to make a detailed elaboration on this theory respectively. Later on, the core part of the thesis, that is, Chapter Four, aims to analyze the characteristics of pragmatic vagueness of diplomatic language under the Relevance-Adaptation Model. In this chapter, characteristics of pragmatic vagueness of diplomatic language on the whole are displayed firstly. Then the thesis discusses the variability of vagueness from lexical, sentential and discourse level and presents the adaptation process, pragmatic functions and its production mechanism and interpretation mechanism of vague language. Lastly, the thesis indicates the limitations and suggestions in order to better apply this model in diplomatic language and other domains.All the data for the analysis of pragmatic vagueness in the People’s Republic of China Foreign Ministry press conference are collected from the website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China. They are the spokesperson’s original remarks and the author quotes the complete form of every remark without changing it. From October1st,2011to November30th,2012, there are223regular press conferences in total. The author chooses80of them at random and analyzes17of these80regular press conferences with the purpose of digging out various linguistic means to achieve pragmatic vagueness.In a conclusion, pragmatic vagueness is a pervasive linguistic phenomenon and an intentional communicative strategy in the foreign ministry press conference and has its significance both theoretically and practically. Pragmatic vagueness is featured with high linguistic variability, adaptability and is a dynamic process of relevance-adaptation process both on language production and language interpretation. It is imperative to attach much importance to it in diplomatic language. Therefore, it is hoped that this paper could be conducive to better understand the features of the diplomatic language and widen the application spheres of the Relevance-Adaptation Model.