| In practical language use, people tend to worship precision and avoid fuzziness, assuming that only by means of precise wordings can the beauty of language be achieved. However, a large number of fuzzy wordings do exist in the real-world communication due to the nature of language itself and specific communication needs. This paradoxical phenomenon makes fuzzy linguistics, a new interdisciplinary subject, one of the major concerns for experts both at home and abroad. Extensive and profound researches have been conducted on the fuzziness of language and have produced abundant fruits.However, the contemporary studies are by no means unquestionable. Most of them are confined to discussions of the origins of fuzziness, the relationship between precision and fuzziness, etc within the scope of semantics; a few others discuss the communicative functions of fuzzy language from the perspective of pragmatics. Few efforts have been made to explore the relationship between fuzziness and the aesthetic functions of language from a cognitive perspective. Because of their indeterminacy of denotative meanings, fuzzy wordings can produce the aesthetic beauties of euphemism, implication, artistic conception, etc., which have been long ignored. Therefore, the author attempts to explore the aesthetic functions of fuzzy language in this thesis from a cognitive perspective by the application of Gestalt-Reception-Aesthetics theory.The Gestalt-Reception-Aesthetics theory as its name suggests, is the combination of Gestalt theory and Reception Aesthetics theory. The two theories find their common ground in the aesthetic field, i.e. people have a fundamental requirement for the aesthetic characteristics of wholeness or Gestalt, harmony, simplicity and order. This is of great significance to appreciating the aesthetic values of fuzziness because fuzziness, the code word for indeterminacy and blankness, can provide unknown and thought-provoking room for the recipients to give the fuzzy words profound meanings and whole pictures.The selection of advertisements as our corpus in the presentation of the theme lies in that fuzzy words are widely and deliberately employed in advertisements. As a special kind of styles, advertising has laid great emphasis on the appeal of language, whereas the indeterminacy and blankness of fuzzy wordings can appeal people to reconstruct the meanings creatively and freely, achieving the effects of attracting consumers and stimulating consumption.In short, the author intends to probe into the aesthetic values of fuzzy expressions with advertisements as its corpus from a rather new perspective—cognitive perspective, by applying the Gestalt-Reception-Aesthetics, aiming to prove that fuzziness is far from a flaw of natural languages and if used appropriately, it can display the vitality and resilience of language, producing a special beauty. Hopefully, this thesis can give fresh impetus to ongoing research in the exploration of fuzzy language.The whole thesis consists of six parts, Introduction, Chapter 1-4, and Conclusion.The Introduction offers a general introduction to this thesis concerning research background, theoretical foundations, research objective and significance, corpus selection and research methodology as well as organizing structure.Chapter 1 reviews studies in the field of fuzziness both at home and abroad and moreover, points out the achievements and limitations of contemporary linguistic studies.Chapter 2 discusses the main principles and concepts of Gestalt and Reception Aesthetics theories, providing the theoretical foundation for this thesis.Chapter 3 explains why we have selected advertising language as our research corpus and at what levels of fuzziness are realized in advertisements.In Chapter 4, interpretation of fuzzy language in advertisements will be fully presented from the perspective of Gestalt-Reception Aesthetics.The final part is the Conclusion of this thesis, in which limitations of this thesis are pointed out and future studies are suggested.
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