A Pragmatic Analysis Of Vague Language In English News Reporting

Vagueness occurs frequently in language communication. The explorations of vagueness receive attentions from philosophy, semantics and pragmatics. Employing descriptive and qualitative methods, the present thesis probes into the pragmatic vagueness in news reporting based on the theoretical framework developed from Verschueren's (2000) Adaptation Theory. In the current thesis, the author focuses on a number of selected news materials from the two authoritative news websites (http:www.timesonline.co.uk and http://www.cnn.com) to seek the answers to the following two questions: (l)What are the main lexical linguistic realization devices of vagueness in news?(2)Why do reporters use vague language in news? What are the pragmatic functions of vague language in news? Through careful scrutiny of the data, we find out two main lexical means of vagueness in news reporting, namely, hedges and vague words. According to Verschueren's theory of three properties of language and four angles of investigation, the thesis carefully analyzes the hedges mainly based on Hyland's model and then investigates vague words in five passages chosen from the news websites covering politics, economics, sports, entertainment and technology. Through the detailed analyses of these two main realization devices, the research shows that vague language is an effective and appropriate strategy employed by reporters in news reporting, which is made as adaptation to the mental world, namely adapting to giving the right amount of information, adapting to accuracy, flexibility,objectivity and timeliness as well as adaptation to the objective situation --thesituation when lacking exact or adequate information. Therefore, we can arrive at a conclusion that vague language is a result of both linguistic choice and linguistic adaptation. Vague language has four pragmatic functions in news:(1)giving the right amount of information;(2) increasing creditability and appropriateness of news language;(3)improving flexibility of news language; and (4)achieving politeness. It is hoped that the present study may enrich the research on vague language and provide some hints to reporters or readers, such as to help reporters use vague language more appropriately and tactfully or help readers have a better understanding of why reporters employ vague language in news. The study also helps students to learn to write news reporting in a tactful way.