Fuzziness And Its Pragmatic Functions

With the appearance of Zadeh's "fuzzy sets" theory in 1965, more and more people do their research on the basis of fuzziness and there has emerged a "fuzziness rush" in different scopes. A lot of foreign linguists turn to study fuzziness and fuzzy linguistics. Chinese linguists started their study on fuzziness from the late of 1970s. Mr. Wu Teiping's "On fuzziness" published in 1979 played the role of eye-opener for Chinese linguists.This paper gives a general statement of fuzziness. From the cognitive point of view, I make the conclusion it is the perceptual process and language acquisition that cause the existence of fuzziness, instead of contexts or the objects in the universe themselves. A lot of examples are given, showing fuzzy language is neither all "bad" nor all "good". It is argued that fuzzy language is always deliberately used to demonstrate different pragmatic functions, such as obeying the cooperative principle and the politeness principles or reducing conversational implicature. According to the analysis of above-mentioned pragmatic functions of fuzzy language, I finally give my opinion that fuzzy language can help save the face of both parties in a conversation if it is appropriately used.