An Analysis On Application Of Pragmatic Vagueness In Financial Discourses--With Focus On Alan Greenspan's Financial Remarks

The present study examines pragmatic vagueness, a linguistic phenomenon frequently found in communicative activities. Pragmatic vagueness is regarded as a strategy occurring in specific communicative contexts, where the addresser manipulates different linguistic markers of pragmatic vagueness to transfer two or more different kinds of illocutionary forces, thus bringing about discoursal implication or metaphoric effect and making it hard for the addressee to infer the addresser's real intention from his vague expressions.This study attempts to provide a tentative analysis of vagueness from a pragmatic perspective, looking at its indeterminate nature including defeasibility, non-detachability, non-conventionality and non-determinability. This analysis touches upon the functions of pragmatic vagueness, viz., enhancing the flexibility of an utterance, improving the appropriateness of the utterances, and creating special communicative effects, including some specific non-derivative and mitigative effect.The data investigated are financial remarks or reports delivered by Alan Greenspan, the incumbent Chairman of the Federal Reserve Board (FRB) of the USA. The analysis focuses on how Greenspan makes use of hedging and modality to realize hiscommunicative target-to keep secret specific information of the FRB monetarypolicy and transfer the FRB's official attitude to the public with a certain degree of transparency. We conclude that pragmatic vagueness is a rhetorically proficient strategy for communication and has stylistic features in Alan Greenspan's financial remarks, but it is insufficient to validate the claim of an FRB language model.