A Study On The Vagueness In The Spokesperson’s Remarks Of The United States Department Of State

As an important part of diplomacy, press conference of foreign ministry plays a vital rolein declaring political stance, maintaining national interests, and enhancing internationalexchanges. Therefore, when answering tough questions raised by journalists, thespokesperson needs to protect state interests and responds politely at the same time. In thiscase, the spokesperson would employ vagueness as one of the skills to obtain the goals offoreign policy. As a commonly occuring language phenomenon with uncertain extension andunspecific connotation, vagueness is more general and flexible than precise language andmeets the communicative intentions better in some situations.In this thesis, the remarks of nine press conferences are collected randomly from a total of109spokesperson’s remarks from January2013to June2013on the United State Departmentof State official website. It is aimed to find out the using of vagueness in spokesperson’sremarks from the perspective of the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle and itsfunctions in these selected remarks. On the analysis of these materials, the findings are asfollows:1) Diplomatic vagueness is realized at lexical level (57.11%), syntactic level (33.31%),and cross-textual level (9.56%) in spokesperson’s remarks. The lexical vagueness includesnouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs: the nouns (8.92%) show attitude and characteristic ofthe speakers; the adjectives (16.42%) show degree and condition of the situations,characteristic of the speakers, and result of the negotiations; the adverbs (10.69%) showdegree of the situations, and time of the matters; the verbs (21.12%) show attitude andsuggestion of the speakers, change of the situations, psychological activity, and ease the toneand so on. The syntactic vagueness includes plural forms (8.77%), subject with unclearreferents (7.05%), negative sentences (9.89%), and frequently used structures to showobjection, agreement, attitude of the speakers (7.56%) and so on. 2) The Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle are the two main pragmaticprinciples which have been used to analyze vagueness in these spokespersons’ remarks. Thesespokespersons always violate the Cooperative Principle and observe the Politeness Principleto obtain the aims of foreign policy, safeguard nation interests, and avoid diplomatic disputes.3) The functions of vagueness in these remarks which are conherent with JoannaChannel’s theory, mainly include: being polite, being self-protecting, being flexible, andcreating harmonious atmosphere.The present study carries both theoretical and practical significance. Theortically, thisstudy further proves the explanatory power of the Cooperative Principle and the PolitenessPrinciple, and reveals the applications of vagueness in diplomatic language. And prcatically,this study is useful for language users in related areas to use vagueness more skillfully andobtain the communication purposes better.