A Study Of Fuzzy Language In Daily Communication

Since Eubulides, a philosopher in ancient Greek, proposed the sorites paradox, which contained the idea of fuzziness, fuzziness in language has attracted more and more attention and research. But, many researchers thought that the actual study of fuzzy language began with fuzzy sets theory of L. A. Zadeh, who was an American professor of California University at Berkeley. L. A. Zadeh had the thesis Fuzzy Sets published (1967) in Information and Control, and pointed out that the subjects in the real world usually do not have very sharply definite boundaries. From then on fuzziness has been applied in many scientific fields, including linguistic field.Just as preciseness, fuzziness is the characteristic of language as well, ubiquitously existing in natural language and playing an important role in daily communication so as to achieve expected communicative goal, for example, withholding information, being persuasive, self-protection, mitigating one's responsibility, creating a harmonious atmosphere. Therefore, appropriately using fuzziness in communicative language is universal and inevitable for successful communication.The whole thesis is divided into six chapters.Chapter One presents the study background of the intrinsic nature and recent study of linguistic fuzziness, and puts forward the application of fuzziness in daily communication as the subject of the thesis, then points out the objective and significance of the study. Finally, it sketches out the organization of the thesis.Chapter Two introduces the development of fuzziness theory, including the previous research on fuzziness (philosophical studies, linguistic studies), the initiation of fuzziness as a nature of language, etc.Chapter Three analyzes the fuzziness of language from several aspects. Firstly, it introduces the definition of fuzziness. Secondly, it compares fuzziness with other notions, such as vagueness, generality, ambiguity, polysemy, etc. Thirdly, it analyzes the causes of fuzziness in natural language and the causes in daily communicative language, and finally classifies the fuzzy expressions in daily communication.Chapter Four, from four aspects (context, hedges, culture, and pragmatics), discusses how to understand fuzziness applied in daily communication, and also proposes the positive significance of applying fuzziness in daily communication for the communicators: fostering awareness of utilizing fuzzy language, developing cognitive learning styles of inference and guessing, flexible selection of fuzzy language.Chapter Five includes two parts. One is about the means of applying fuzziness to realize efficient communication. The other is about the ideal purposes of applying fuzziness to realize efficient communicationChapter Six is the conclusion of the whole thesis. In this chapter the author summarizes the main contents of the whole passage, then points out the limitations of this thesis and gives some meaningful suggestions for future study.