A Cognitive-Pragmatic Approach To Fuzziness In English Journalism

Fuzziness, as an essential property of human language, has been researched for a long history. The previous studies were concerned with the definition, origin and functions from semantic, pragmatic and cognitive perspectives. But little effort has been made in the field of perceivers' inferential mechanism for fuzziness in specific disciplines. In the English journalism, the analyses on fuzziness are always concerned with the pragmatic functions the fuzzy expressions can play. The cognitive basis of the readers' interpretation about the fuzziness is rarely discussed. This paper will discuss the origin of the existence of fuzziness in English journalism from the perspective of linguistics and Communication, and try to figure out the readers' interpretation mechanism behind those fuzzy expressions. Theories adopted are Relevance Theory and ICM. The examples in the thesis are from the news of The New York Times and China Daily published in May 2010.Since the interaction between readers and journalists of newspapers is a special form of communication, the journalism is not a one-sided matter only involving the journalists' efforts to convey the information. It requires the readers' cognitive efforts to reach the optimal relevance proposed by Relevance Theory. During the process, cognitive contexts should be triggered and activated to contribute to the degree of interpretation, including experience, cultural literacy, contexts and consensus between the two sides. With the participation of such cognitive factors, the readers can realize the maximal cognitive effects with minimal efforts and comprehend the journalists' intention.ICM, which was proposed by Lakoff (1987), is also an indispensable tool for readers to interpret the journalistic fuzzy expressions. First, the interpretation process of the journalistic texts would involve ICMs. Journalists would adopt fuzzy expressions in the report consciously, aiming to guide the readers to change and take certain form of new ICMs intended by them. In this way, it is possible for the journalists to convey their standpoints and orientations to the readers imperceptibly. Second, in the readers'reading process, the fuzzy expressions could require the readers to trigger corresponding ICMs and begin pragmatic inference in order to realize the interpretation of the whole text.