A Study Of Pragmatic Vagueness In American Spokesmen’s Remarks In Press Conferences

The press conference is important for the government to publish domestic and overseas news and guide public opinions. It consists of reporters’ questions and press spokesmen’s answers. The spokesman publishes news on behalf of the government, and the reporters obtain necessary news on behalf of new organizations. We can see from literatures that recent home and abroad researches mainly focus on pragmatics, stylistics,journalism politics and other fields, few of them analyze spokesman’s vague language phenomenon during conference combining linguistics and pragmatics. Vague language,as one common linguistic phenomenon, has the characters of uncertain extension and unspecified connotation. Compared with precise language, vague language greater generality and flexibility to satisfy communicative purpose better under special conditions. Therefore, this paper tries to research on pragmatic vagueness of American foreign ministry spokesmen in the press conference from the point of combination of linguistics and pragmatics, having significant theoretical value and practical guiding significance.This paper is based on Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, and takes answers of American foreign ministry spokesmen in the press conference as research materials, randomly draws 9 from 115 written materials of answers to reporters’ requests from January 2015 to June 2015 on http://www.state.gov/. The author adopts quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis and follows the theoretical basis of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle to analyze the collected corpus. There is a certain relationship among a spokesmen’ remarks for the use of vague language,Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Leech’s Politeness Principle by using qualitative methods. This can help us to understand the purpose of spokesman thoroughly.Through quantitative research methods, to analysis a spokesmen using the number and frequency of vague phenomenon.The author wants to prove that a spokesmen using of vague language is implemented through the lexical and syntactic level. It must be said, though, the diplomatic language is vague, it is also precise. This paper focuses on vagueness of diplomatic language, so the discussions are limited to it.This paper mainly adopts quantitative and qualitative analysis method to research and discuss below questions:(1) What language layers are used by the United StatesDepartment of State spokesman to implement vague language?(2) How does spokesmen operate Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle to reach its specking intention using vague language?(3) What are pragmatic functions generated when the spokesmen use vague language?By the quantitative research method, pragmatic vagueness in American spokesmen’s remarks has been analyzed the frequency of using vagueness at vocabulary level is higher than at the syntactic level. At vocabulary level, verbs and adjectives are most frequently used than the others.At syntactic level, the form of negative sentences is most frequency used. Through the qualitative research method, the author found that the Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle are two principles of pragmatics in American spokesmen’s remarks in press conferences. Also summed up four pragmatic functions of vague language: to retain Information, cover up shortage, concise expression, create harmonious atmosphere. Secondly the author also found spokesmen always violate the maxim of quality,maxim of quantity,maxim of relation,maxim of manner in Cooperative Principle and observe the Politeness Principle to achieve diplomatic goals, to safeguard their interests and avoid diplomatic disputes.By researching vagueness in spokesmen of the US State Department answered reporters’ questions, allowing us to interpret the real purpose of spokesmen to speak and to inspire news conference translators with accurate understanding of vagueness so that they can do their translation works better. Meanwhile, there are some inspirations for teaching learners how to make use of vagueness properly in English teaching.