An Empirical Study On Approximating Quantities Of Chinese College English Learners In Writing

Vague phenomenon is frequently encountered in our daily communications. Traditionally, people use a two-valued logic, true or false proposition without other categories. Yet, two-valued logic cannot deal with natural language properly in that some propositions are neither complete belonging, nor non-belonging to either category. People have many beliefs about language. One important point is that"good"usage involves clarity and precision. However, recent studies on language use shows that speakers and writers tailor their language to make it suitable to the situation and the linguistic context. And one way to tailor their language is by varying the precision and vagueness. Consequently, an understanding of vague language use in English would appear to be valuable in any field which teaches, analyses, or uses English language. The present study is to study Chinese college English learner's use of approximating quantities.Though vague phenomenon called as Sorites Paradox can be traced to the ancient Greek philosophy, it has been neglected until 1960s. Zadeh is the first one who puts forward the theory of fuzziness. In linguistic circle, George Lakoff was the first linguist who ever employed the fuzzy set theory (FST) in linguistic analysis. From then on, various studies arise in different fields. The natural language research is based on natural language. It is rather empirical than theoretical. Many scholars put forward the definition of vagueness of fuzziness. Nowadays, people confine it to borderline cases.The thesis uses CLEC which consists of compositions by both English (Band Four and Eight) and non-English (Band 4 and Band 6) majors. By using searching tool to find out the distribution and frequency of the items intended for study, the data is analyzed. And a comparison with native speakers is then conducted.The analysis shows that: first, Chinese college English learners use too few approximating quantities with approximators; second, when there are several equally qualified items, Chinese college English learners often tend to be dependent on one, two or three of them; third, there are some items which are not under their domain of control, especially those whose appearance is numbered 0; fourth, there are still errors made by Chinese college English learners. It is caused probably by: first, syllabus haven't included some of the items; second, they are not in good command of some expressions, so they tend to use the simple and safe expressions; third, they do not know when, why and how to use the approximating quantities, though they have grammatically mastered them; fourth, since some of the students are under test, their pressure as well as anxiety would exert some side effects on their performance.Based on the findings, both the instructors and the learners should have a correct attitude towards vague language. Vague language is neither good nor bad, and we should learn when, why and how to use vague language. Syllabus designers should also attach importance to it.This study shows students are not in satisfactory command of vague language. It has some limitations, so future researches are expected.