Vague Utterances In Illegal Television Home Shopping Programs

Since its debut in the 1990s,Television Home Shopping Industry(TVHSI for short)has been bringing in sizzling sales on the one hand but also various deceptive cases on the other.Some advertisers take advantage of the lagging-behind supervision system and slack vigilance of the customers,incurring losses to customers economically,healthily and mentally.The deteriorating reputation of TVHSI has almost made it synonymous to deceptive discourse,drawing attention from scholars in various academic fields.The previous studies on deceptive discourse have revealed that the use of vague language can be one of the several linguistic features in deceptive discourses.Some Chinese scholars have investigated into the potentially misleading or deceptive functions of vague language used in advertisements.The bulk of them equate deception with the use of vague language based only on the researchers own observation and reflection,which is rather subjective and unsatisfactory.Therefore,a few questions are left unresolved in this field:what is the relationship between the use of vague language and deception?Why can the use of some vague language help the advertisers achieve their deceptive goals?What is the inner mechanism underlying the deceptive vague language?Against the above social and academic background,the author adopts a combination of both theoretical analysis and empirical methodology.Specifically,while drawing on related pragmatic theories,the study also adopts the audience perspective,in an attempt to explore the inner relationship between vague language and deception.Thus,the present study aims to disclose the operating mechanism of using vague utterances(including those arising from the use of vague language,the loose of precise figures,and the communication of interdeterminate implicatures)to realize deceptive goals,enhance the discerning abilities of deceptive vague utterances,and provide professional advice for the TVHS program.The major findings of this study are presented as follows:1)Deceptive TVHS programs use a large quantity of vague utterances,especially those that result from using fuzzy language.In terms of the content involved,the vague utterances used in TVHS programs are mostly concerned with product description.Vagueness is used frequently in TVHS programs,with one instance in every two clauses.In terms of the reasons that cause vagueness,the use of fuzzy language accounts for up to 70%of the total;however,vagueness caused by the use of approximate and indeterminate language is found to be nonexistent in TVGS videos,perhaps for the reason that the advertisers intentionally avoid using these two kinds of vagueness in case they would present themselves as lacking in confidence in their own products.In terms of the content involved,the descriptions of the products have been found to be using the most quantity of vagueness,with the majority of them being centered around the effect and functions of the product advertised.2)Using vagueness is a favored strategy of all deceptive strategies spotted by the subjects,and most of the vagueness used isseen to be potentially deceptive.The deceptive strategies realized through vagueness comprise the major part of the deceptive strategies.Different from the previous studies in which vague language tends to be directly assumed as deceptive,this study draws its conclusion based on a combination of audience survey and interview and find that more than 80%of the vagueness in TVHS discourses is potentially deceptive,with the majority of them being fuzzy-type of vagueness and related to some key aspects like the product;the remaining less than 20%vague instances used is deemed to be non-deceptive because they are used in some other aspects like the description of the customers ' own experience or in some interactional questions.3)The understanding of vague utterances requires pragmatic enrichment.While the pragmatic enrichment is constrained by objective contextual factors,there is still some subjective room for individuals to adjust their interpretation.Consequently,different individuals,influenced by various social mentalities to different extent,might come up with different interpretations for the same vague utterance.The advertisers make use of these social psyches through vague utterances to realize their deceptive motives.To understand the vague utterances used in TVHS programs,consumers need to undergo pragmatic enrichment constrained by the context in question and their encyclopedic knowledge.It also can be affected by the recipients' subjective factors,which makes the result of their pragmatic enrichment vary from individual to individual,thus leading to different mental and actual response.The difference in pragmatic enrichment is mostly decided by the extent to which the individuals are affected by certain social mentalities.The illegal TVHS program advertisers intentionally make use of various social mentalities through utterance vagueness,misleading the customers into doing pragmatic enrichment in the direction they wish,thus enhancing the chanees of realizing their deceptive motives.This reveals the advertisers' negative adaption to socio-psychological factors.Through data analysis in terms of different groups of age,sex and educational level,the study shows that the senior age group,female and low-educational groups seem to be more likely to be cheated than other groups.This study,by investigating vague utterances in TVHS programs from a critical pragmatic perspective,yields the following implications.Theoretically speaking,the present study,by taking into account of contextual correlates,language users as well as the communicative goals,demonstrates the advantage of a dynamic perspective as well as a discursive approach,thus advancing the previous vagueness research.In addition,the finding that the deceptive property of utterance vagueness is closely related to the content concerned and social mentalities makes the study of vague language more goal-oriented and realistic,and thus will prove inspirational for the future research.What's more,different from the prior research on pragmatic enrichment that the objective contextual correlates would naturally determine a definite interpretation of a certain discourse,this paper finds that there 1s still some room for subjectivity in the pragmatic enrichment of vague utterances,which has deepened and complemented the original pragmatic enrichment theory.Practically speaking,this paper,using commercial discourses as the data for study in our real life to disclose the inner mechanism of deceptive vagueness,has deepened the public understandings and enhanced awareness of deceptive commercial discourses.The present study also provides professional guidance for the public to recognize deceptive commercial discourses based on the language research on the one hand,and offers theoretical backup and professional guidance for the supervision department of the TV commercial programs on the other.Methodologically,this research,by using questionnaires and interview,adopts an audience perspective combined with a theoretical reflection to make the research result more objective.Applying a critical pragmatic theoretical framework to conduct a research in a relatively systematic manner,this paper has contributed to the further development of critical pragmatic research while enriching the research methods of critical analysis.