| Vagueness of language,similar to preciseness of language,is one of the essential properties of natural language.As a communicative strategy,vagueness is widely used in people’s daily communication.Vague phenomena of language have gradually received widespread attention from language researchers since Zadeh put forward the theory of fuzzy sets in 1965.Scholars from foreign and domestic countries have studied and explored the vague phenomena of language from different perspectives.It is commonly accepted that 21st century has seen the rapid development of economy and the improvement of people’s living standards.Much more attention has been given to sports by people worldwide.A growing number of countries have raised the development of sports,especially the development of competitive sports,to the level of national strategic development.Sports news,a specialized way for reporting sports facts and spreading the information,plays a significant role in sports life of the mass.Due to the reinforcement of globalization and the development of network and multimedia,sports news audiences are no longer limited to domestic readers but to overall global readers.Under different linguistic and cultural backgrounds,vague phenomena in sports news reports often cause barriers and misunderstandings for intercultural communication and affect accurate spreading of news information.Some scholars have researched vague phenomena in sports news,however,their studies are limited to the discussion of features and functions of vague words or hedges in a language.Few of them have conducted a comparative study to research the employment of vagueness between two different languages.In view of this,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to do the research in a comparative way.On the theoretical basis of He Ziran’s theory of vagueness in pragmatics and Verschueren’contextual adaptation theory,this thesis conducts a comparative study to research the employment of vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games from the perspective of pragmatics and focuses on pursuing the answers to the three questions:（1）Based on He Ziran’s classifications of vagueness,what are the distributional similarities and differences of vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games?（2）What are the possible underlying causes for resulting in the similarities and differences in the employment of vagueness?（3）Based on contextual adaptation theory,how does vagueness adapt to physical world,social world and mental world in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games?The thesis takes vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games as the research object,respectively choosing thirty pieces of sports news reports regarding the 2016 Rio Olympic Games from the websites of The Guardian and People’s Daily to build two parallel corpora,and adopting quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to address on the questions.To be specific,first of all,based on He Ziran’s classifications of vagueness,marking all the vagueness in the two corpora respectively by manual,classifying them and comparing their distributional similarities and differences.Then the study tries to further analyze the possible underlying causes for resulting in such similarities and differences.At last,combined with Verschueren’s contextual adaptation theory,the author explores the pragmatic functions of vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games.The thesis comes to the following conclusion.It is found that there is a tendency of employing vagueness in sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games by both English and Chinese news writers.Firstly,English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games are quite similar in the general frequency distribution of vagueness with hedging employed the most frequently and ranking the first,nomenclative evaluation the second,fuzzy continuum the third,taxonomic category the last;there exist large differences in the frequency distribution of each subcategory of vagueness between English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games within He Ziran’s classifications of vagueness,and the frequency of each subcategory of vagueness in Chinese sports news reports is higher than that in English sports news reports.Secondly,the inevitability of vagueness and the typical characteristics of sports news may account for the similar general frequency distribution while different cultural backgrounds and different ways of thinking may cause the large differences in the distribution of frequency.Thirdly,vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games can bring about the functions of enhancing accuracy,objectiveness and timeliness to adapt to the physical world;the functions of being polite and avoiding negative effects to adapt to social world;the functions of enforcing readability and improving flexibility of writers’expressions to adapt to the mental world.The thesis focuses on vagueness in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games from the perspective of pragmatics,which further proves the reasonability and comprehensibility of He Ziran’s classifications of vagueness as well as the explanatory power of Verschueren’s contextual adaptation theory.And the findings of the study can benefit news writers,readers and translators a lot in understanding the vague phenomena in English and Chinese sports news reports of Rio Olympic Games,which will improve their abilities of intercultural communication and promote the development of sports. |
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