A Cognitive Approach To Semantic Vagueness

The phenomenon of vague language is pervasive in our everyday life and has long been arousing the attention of linguists, logicians, philosophers and psychologists. Over the past two decades, Cognitive Linguistics has grown to be one of the most broadly appealing and dynamic frameworks for the study of natural language. This new school of linguistics focuses on the meaning side of language—linguistic form is analyzed as an expression of conceptual meaning, so the progress made in this area opens up a new approach to revisit the phenomenon of semantic vagueness.This paper holds that vagueness is an innate property of natural language and tries to explicate its innateness and pervasiveness from a cognitive approach. After a general survey on the issue of vagueness, the paper clarifies the characteristic of vagueness in this paper, that is, lack of well-defined extensions, having borderline cases and context-independent. Then, the paper explores the relationship between semantic vagueness and two important aspects of cognitive linguistics, namely, categorization and conceptual metaphor and metonymy.Categorization is an essential aspect of human cognition and it facilitates us to perceive the world more efficiently and effectively. A cognitive paradigm claims that categories are not homogeneous, but have a prototype, good and bad members, and in most cases have fuzzy boundaries. In addition, category members do not all share the same discrete attributes but may be linked by family resemblances. Therefore, such a graded and radial structure of categories gives rise to semantic vagueness.On the other hand, conceptual metaphors and metonymies are seen by cognitive linguists as powerful cognitive tools for our conceptualization of abstract categories. They are fundamental mechanisms for meaning extension. Accordingly, the paper speculates that in the process of mapping, the original semantic vagueness in the source domain will be mapped onto the target domain, and at the same time, the mapping of certain reasoning patterns will also bring about some new semantic vagueness. Thus, by metaphors and metonymies, semantic vagueness is extended, making it an"inescapable characteristic of the concepts that language expresses".