On Language Vagueness And Its Function Of Maintaining Politeness

Most expressions in natural language are vague. Vagueness, which refers to the possession of borderline cases, should also be viewed as an underlying nature of language, along with arbitrariness, sociality and generativity, etc. Language vagueness could be pervasively sensed phonetically, syntactically, semantically and pragmatically. During the twentieth century, especially in the past thirty years, there has been a resurgence of interest in vagueness study, particularly in connection with the problems posed to Classical Logic. People tend to accept the fact that vagueness is by no means a defect of language. From the perspective of meaning, there are two kinds of language vagueness: semantic vagueness and pragmatic vagueness. The former generally exists in modifiers, numbers and approximators, etc. The latter, with a wider coverage, results both from vague expressions like shields, and loose talks. Semantic vagueness is context-free and cannot be removed by contextual elements; while pragmatic vagueness is context-dependent and can be restricted or eliminated by such strategies as adding meta-pragmatic comments, rephrasing, observing perlocutionary effects. Vagueness alters truth value of propositions and utterances, since unlike the traditional two-valued logic, vagueness is three-valued: true, false and indefinite. In addition, there exists dialectical relationship between vagueness and precision. Through analysis, we find precision may sometimes be very vague, and vagueness highly precise. Another pragmatic characteristic of vagueness lies in that it can convey conversational implicatures. Vague expressions serve a variety of social functions in conversations. One most important function is to serve as a politeness strategy, softening implicit complaints and criticisms, saving speech participants'faces.