Semantic Fuzziness And Pragmatic Appropriateness

In the light of the fruitful study already made both domestically and abroad ever since, the paper dissects the nature, structure and the cognitive root for the formation the continuum - an integrality with both clear definite central area and woolly boundary semantically, then pragmatically, principle of appropriateness is investigated with the approach of Conversational Analysis through abundant exemplifications since that the formation as well as the actual existence of fuzzy borderlines are soundly proved cognitively and mathematically.In the introduction, the general historical background of both fuzzy phenomena and linguistic (actually semantic) fuzziness is gone over briefly. Then the scheme in constructing the framework of the integrated study is put forward. Moreover some primary issues as characteristics and basic distinction of fuzziness in natural language are inquired so as to pin down the concept.Then in the second part of literature review, the historical course of the relevant studies, especially prominent and most influential ones are outlined so that we can see where we are now in the research in this area, and also know what is left to be done and what we can do in future.In the third part, the attention is mainly focused on some fundamental problems, like the borderline cases and semantic continuum, in discussing semantic fuzziness.The forth and fifth part are devoted to the mathematical way of describing and analyzing the semantic fuzziness, with the latter all my own tentative statistic analysis, as the case in part six. Of course these new thoughts are given birth by the enlightening discussions other scholars made.From the seventh part on to the nineth, all the contents, which make up the main body of the entire paper, are making thorough surveys into the pragmatic appropriateness that may be conveyed through the use of fuzzy expressions, especially that typical group of fuzzy language - hedges. Then at last the whole research is summarized and also problems in the overall studies are pointed out.