Motivation Analysis Of Vague Language Production

In real life, vague language always exists. Vague language production is complicated, concerning not only context and hearers, but also the speaker's psychological factors.Generally speaking, psychological factors, in terms of individual psychology, involve motivation, cognition, affection, personality, etc.. Motivation is defined as an inferred internal process that activates, guides, and maintains behavior over time (Baron, 1992:362). It's believed to be internal processes that can't be directly observed, but can activate, guide, and maintain overt behaviors, and also can be inferred indirectly through the choice of tasks, level of exertion, insistence of activities, language production and more outer behaviors. Motivation can be categorized in many different ways, according to the level of consciousness, it can be divided into two aspects: conscious motivation and unconscious motivation. The author discusses the conscious motivations of vague language production, that is, the speaker's or writer's vague language production is intentional to some degree. The result of analysis shows that the speaker's vague language production mainly involves the following motivations: supplying the right amount of information, hiding information purposely, protecting oneself, showing politeness, meeting the need for esteem, performing varied illocutionary or perlocutionary forces, following principle of economy, declaring one's position, communicating affections, etc..Hence the thesis comes to the conclusion that motivations are the basic premise of vague language production, the same motivation may lead to various vague language production; on the other hand, vague language production may come from different kinds of motivations, there are close relationship between motivation and vague language production.It's believed that the study, which explores the relationship between motivation and vague language production from the perspective of psycholinguistics, will be of some help to grasp the static characteristics of vague language, and to explore further the cause of language vagueness.