Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In London2012Olympic News From Adaptation Theory

Influenced by foreign linguists represented by Geoffrey Leech (1983), PenelopeBrown&Steve Levinson (1987), much attention has been paid to the research ofpragmatic vagueness in China since1980s. With the studies conducted by YuDongming（1997）, He Ziran（1990,2000）, Hou Guojin（2005）and other scholars,pragmatic vagueness study gradually became an independent research category. Asmuch of the previous studies have focused on the pragmatic functions of pragmaticvagueness, and there are a few studies of its production and interpretation in concretecorpus, this paper will analyze the production and interpretation of pragmaticvagueness with Verschueren(2000)’s Adaptation Theory as the theoreticalframework.This paper will study adaptability from four integrated angles, that is,contextual correlates of adaptability, structural objects of adaptability, dynamics ofadaptability and the salience of adaptation processes, which can overcome thelimitations of most studies that only concentrate on the analysis of contextualcorrelates of adaptability.Journalism is an independent research field characterized by its own theoriesand principles. The analysis of pragmatic vagueness in news coverage is based on theinterdisciplinary study of pragmatics and journalism, which makes this studysystematic and comprehensive. Therefore, this thesis will concentrate on the study ofthe journalists’production and the audience’s interpretation of pragmatic vagueness innews coverage. The reasons why London2012Olympic News are chosen as the dataare because they are not only up-to-date, but also cover various kinds of coverage,such as politics, economics, sports, business, which are conductive to analyzepragmatic vagueness in different contexts. The relevant data about pragmaticvagueness are randomly collected from six major quality newspapers, that is, Daily Mirror, The Guardian, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, China Daily and GlobalTimes. Through descriptive analysis and document analysis, together with thediscussion of the characteristics of news, this paper points out that the reasons whypragmatic vagueness in news coverage is selected are because journalists consciouslyconduct perception and representation, planning and memory in a dynamic process toadapt to contextual correlates so as to realize self-protection of the journalist, preserveprivacy of the subjects, safeguard ethical expectations, express politeness, meetpolitical demand, and make news reports timely and accurate, and to adapt tostructural objects to maintain the formal characteristic of hard news, make the newsreport cohesive and highlight the theme.The application of pragmatic vagueness in London2012Olympic News furtherspragmatic vagueness study in a specific corpus. Moreover, this thesis is conductive toanswer the reasons why journalists frequently organize news with vague expressionsand help the audience acquire a better apprehension of pragmatic vagueness in newsreports.