A Corpus-Based Study Of Vague Expressions In Marine Engineering English

There are various ways of being vague in English. This study is a corpus-based investigation of the distribution and use of vague expressions in marine engineering English. With the assistance of statistical packages such as SPSS and FoxPro, vague expressions in MEE, JDEST and BNC/W are quantified and compared. The results reveal that vague expressions are widely employed in MEE; however, they occur less frequently in MEE than in JDEST and BNCAV. In MEE, some is the most frequently used vague expression, with a high frequency overriding any of the other individual vague expressions. In terms of different types of vague expressions, non-numerical quantifiers occur most frequently, among which the closed-class quantifiers are used more frequently than the open-class ones. In general, the distributional pattern of vague expressions by types in MEE and JDEST is rather similar, with the same ranking for each category. However, approximators, partial specifiers and vague category referrers are used more frequently in MEE than in JDEST and BNC/W. There is no placeholder word in MEE, which expresses totally vague meaning. Besides, approximators in MEE are mostly followed by numbers; in particular, a large percentage of approximately, one of the high-frequency approximators in MEE, are followed by non-round numbers. This seems to diverge from Channell's findings that approximators are more likely to co-occur with round numbers. In conclusion, semantically, vague expressions in MEE increase the fuzziness, but pragmatically, some of them serve to decrease the fuzziness.