Implication And Relevance Of Vague Time Adjuncts In English News Text

Vagueness in reference is often seen as a deplorable deviation from precision and clarity. However, in some cases, the vague expressions are more appropriate than the precise ones. Because of this advantage, vague expressions are widely used, especially the vague time adjuncts, and this is also true for the news report.The data used in this thesis are extracted from New York Times, International News page. Based on investigations into the formation and usage of vague time adjunct, we divided this dissertation into five chapters. Chapter One is Introduction. In this chapter, we generally introduce the main ideas of the whole thesis; research questions and also the significance of it. Chapter Two is A Review on Vagueness and Definition of Vague Time Adjunct. Vagueness (Fuzziness), actually is not a new field, it was noticed and discussed so long ago already. However, it is since 1960s', linguists have begun to pay more attention to it and made a lot of contributions toward this. After reviewing the schools of vagueness, we also defined vague time adjunct in this part. Following the definitions of vagueness and time adjunct, vague time adjunct refers to the time adjunct, which are vague in meaning. Chapter Three is Theory of Implicature and Relevance. In this section, these two theories are introduced, which will be used as the research method in the following studies. In another word, in the next chapter, we will use the implicature and relevance theoretical framework of analysis to analyze the vague time adjunct. Chapter Four is Data Collection and Analysis. This is the main part of the whole thesis. In this part, we firstly classified vague time adjunct into seven types, and then we infer its implications in certain context; finally we make comparison between vague time adjunct and precise time adjunct in terms of relevance. Chapter Five is Conclusion. In this chapter, we primarily conclude the main points stated in the previous four chapters, and then argue that vague time adjunct has much relevance than precise one in news text. That is why most reporters prefer to use vague time adjunct in their news reports.