A Study On Vague Language In Presidential Television Debate From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Vague language is a language concept and phenomenon which reflects the uncertainty of the extension of objective things. There is certain vagueness in presidential television debate. Well interpreting vague language is a key to obtain more information in debate.3 Democratic presidential television debates for 2016 American Presidential Election are selected as material for analysis. With the guideline of adaptation theory by Belgium linguist Verscueren, this thesis conducts a close analysis on vague language in presidential television debate.Firstly, the thesis summaries the categories of vague language at home and abroad. Based on the idea of Channell, and with the analysis of practical materials, the thesis first specifies the categories of vague language from Channell, then elaborates the categories of vague language in presidential television debate. The first category is vague additive that can be further categorized into approximating quantity, tag, and booster. The second one is vague words, which can be sub-categorized into adaptor and vague noun and pronoun. The last one is vagueness by implicature, mainly referring to the vague meaning in precise number. These three categories of vague language are analyzed with abundant practical examples from 3 presidential television debates of American Democratic Party. Secondly, the thesis analyzes the way how vague language functions in presidential television debate by means of exploring how it adapts to contextual factors and is realized from the perspectives of adaptation theory. According to adaptation, contextual factors of language use include physical world, social world and mental world. Through descriptive analysis, it can be concluded that in physical world, vague language in presidential television debates mainly adapts to the temporal reference and spatial reference, while in social world, it adapts to the relation among candidates, the statuses of candidates and the like. In mental world, it adapts to the psychology of both candidates themselves and the audiences, including intention and will. Thirdly, the functions of vague language in presidential television debate are also summarized in this essay by a multitude of examples. In presidential television debate, vague language mainly possesses informative function and interactive function. From the perspective of informative function, vague language can convey certain messages that the precise one can not, helping candidates to provide sufficient information to support their standpoints. From the perspective of interactive function, vague language functions in four aspects. First, vague language can improve the flexibility of the words in presidential television debate, making words not that boring and offering more spaces for audiences to think. Second, it can also support the opinions of the speakers. Third, it can avoid conflicts so as to reduce the ill effect of the language. Fourth, it can, to some degree, protect the speaker himself.The thesis has yielded certain results by conducting these analyses, hence providing a new perspective to probe language, especially vague language in presidential television debate. Candidates can gain more knowledge about how to behave better in debates by adopting vague language and people can better comprehend vague language in debates so as to get more information. Besides, the thesis has contributed a bit to the application of the theory of adaptation theory, testing its practicability and increasing its persuasive power.