Fuzziness Of Language And The Mutual Conversion Of Fuzziness And Precision

Fuzzy phenomenon has long attracted people's attention. But the widespread study of fuzziness didn't get started until the end of the 19th century. The fuzzy set theory proposed by L.A.Zadeh in 1965 provided people with a convincing theoretical foundation for the study and thus quickly promoted the research of fuzziness to a new scale.Fuzziness, as people have realized, is, in essence, a borderline case. The three basic characteristics of fuzziness are: indeterminacy, determinacy, variability. Indeterminacy refers to the indefiniteness of the referential boundary of a category. Determinacy refers to the invariable core which makes communication involving fuzziness become possible. Variability indicates the narrowing or broadening of the fuzzy boundary.Fuzziness is ubiquitous in the universe and is also the intrinsic attribute of language. Fuzzy phenomenon exists everywhere in the language system. Based on fuzzy set theory and some related linguistic theories such as Semantic Field Theory, we probed into phonetic, grammatical and semantic fuzziness and conclude that even though they all possess the basic features of fuzziness, the three levels of fuzziness result from different causes and display themselves in different ways.First, for phonetic fuzziness, the main cause is the tiny change of the cooperative move of the vocal organs and the influence of conjunctive sounds in different contexts. The various phones and other phonic elements obtained from the grouping and classification of the speech sounds are only approximately precise ones. Then, grammatical fuzziness, mainly fuzziness of word class and syntactic structures, results from the contradiction between the limited grammatical rules and the constant developing of language and language use. The cause of semantic fuzziness, however, is different. Semantic fuzziness, on the whole, results from human beings' exploring and categorizing the objective world.The fuzzy phenomena, though dominantly fuzzy, still carry the precision side of language and can even be converted to precision under certain conditions. The three basic features of fuzziness provide the...