| With the appearance of Zadeh's "fuzzy sets" theory in 1965, various researches have been done on the ground of fuzziness and there has emerged a "fuzziness rush" in different scopes. The study on fuzziness by foreign linguists can be traced back to the late of 1970s. And domestic research on it started by Prof. Wu Tieping's "On Vagueness" published in 1979, which played the role of eye-opener for Chinese linguists. However, application of fuzzy language in news from pragmatic point of view calls for further research efforts.The role of news as mess media is increasingly realized. Since accuracy is the primary and fundamental requirement in news report, how could fuzzy language exist in it? This thesis, based on the previous studies, compares some related terms: fuzziness, vagueness, generality and ambiguity, then introduces different categorizations of fuzzy language. From pragmatic perspective, the author, by employing case study, first, analyzes fuzzy language in news grounded on Gricean "Cooperative Principle", and demonstrates that the flouting of one maxim by adopting fuzziness is to obey another; Secondly, by using relevance theory, the author distinguishes fuzzy language from loose talk in news, further analyzes communicative intention of fuzzy language in news by employing inferential communication mode. Besides, face-threatening theory in politeness theory is adopted to probe into the function of fuzziness in maintaining the face of people concerned or reporters as well as mess media. Lastly, the author points out that proper use of fuzzy language in news can help increasing creditability, saving time, enhancing self-protecting, achieving politeness, contributing vividness, avoiding negative effect; meanwhile, currently certain reporters take advantage of fuzzy expressions to mix the false with the genuine.Thus, the existence of fuzzy language in news is of great importance; Furthermore, the truthfulness, reliability, objectivity and timeliness rely on it to reflect. Having an all-around and deep exploration of fuzzy language in news not only promotes the research of pragmatics but also is propitious for reporters and mess media to proper use of fuzzy language in news so to achieve successful communication intention. |
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