Understanding Pragmatic Vagueness In Verbal Communication: An Integrated Model

Vagueness is a ubiquitous phenomenon in human verbal communication. It is often used to denote a vast multitude of linguistic phenomena. For centuries vagueness has been a major topic for academic investigation. Its fascination beckons many. Language can be vague in different ways, and scholars have adopted divergent approaches to vagueness.Although there is a considerable body of literature on vagueness in the traditional sense of the word, to date, the topic of pragmatic vagueness has not been seriously addressed. The main thrust of the current thesis is the proposal of a new pragmatic model, the CRAP model, which integrates four theoretical perspectives, namely, Grice's co-operative principle (CP), Sperber and Wilson's relevance theory (RT), Verschueren's adaptation theory (AT) and Brown and Levinson's face-based theory of politeness. Our new model owes its genesis to, and is inspired by, these four theories of verbal communication, which have divergent origins and theoretical orientations. However, our model has refined and modified its precursors and not all their characteristics have been inherited. This new model is applied to explaining the production and interpretation of pragmatically vague utterances. Adopting Sperber's (1996) massively modular approach, we view the interpretation of pragmatic vagueness as a non-linear modular process within a massively modular mind.This major objective is achieved on the basis of, and subsequent to, the fulfillment of other preliminary tasks, among which is the differentiation between pragmatic vagueness and semantic vagueness. This distinction roughly dovetails with the opposition between ordinary language philosophy and ideal language philosophy. Naturally-occurring examples attest to the fact that pragmatic vagueness is a strategy we can adopt to our advantage. An investigation of natural language, including vague language, ought to take account of the pragmatic aspect, i.e. the user's intention and the circumstance in which it occurs.When it comes to the taxonomy of pragmatic vagueness, what we discover so far is often an unsystematic assortment of linguistic phenomena, such as approximation, fuzziness, generality, ambiguity, metaphor, meiosis, irony, hyperbole, etc. In the current thesis, an attempt is made to come to grips with the vexed problem of categorizing pragmatic vagueness in a principled way by adopting a systematic and consistent standard. We classify pragmatic vagueness along two dimensions: (1) the locus of vagueness and (2) the way of generation. In this classificatory scheme, we argue that pragmatic vagueness occurs on three levels of language use, namely, quality, quantity and relation, categories attributed to the German philosopher Kant. On each level, pragmatic vagueness can be generated by either observing or flouting the maxims of Grice's CP.