A Corpus-Based Study Of Vagueness Tags In English Speech

Adopting the corpus linguistic approach, the present paper intends first to explore the characteristics of vagueness tags used by native speakers of English in speech, second, to conduct a comparative study of uses of the tags by native speakers and Chinese English learners. BNC and COLSEC are taken as the data source for the studies.Based on previous studies, 106 tags are found occurring 11072 times in the spoken sub-corpus of BNC. It indicates that the tags are frequently used by native speakers. Besides the statistic analysis, some formal features of the tags are figured out. The study finds that most tags share the general structure of"exemplar + tag". Most of them use coordinators, demonstrative, delexicalized nouns and indefinite pronouns. Variations may occur in the inner structure of the tags, which include lexical variations, simplification/extension, singular and plural forms, etc. After the formal analysis, some pragmatic functions that the tags can serve are identified. Some of the most salient functions are referential function, extending function, turn-shifting function and intensifying function. Both cooperative principle and politeness principle can account for the motivations of using tags.In the comparative study, statistically, a general underuse of the tags by Chinese learners is found: only 24 expressions are used as vagueness tags in COLSEC, and 5 of them are self-made-up idiosyncratic expressions. At the same time, 4 tags are found to be overused. Some other characteristics of Chinese learners'use of the tags include misuses and functional deficiency. The underlying factors for these characteristics might be language input, prejudice against vagueness in language, first language transfer/interference and lack of formulaic competence.Based on the findings concerning Chinese learners'use of the tags, suggestions to current English teaching and learning in China are provided.