Analysis Of Vague Expressions In George W.Bush's Weekly Radio Addresses

Verbal communication must be as accurate as possible in using language. But vagueness is a basic feature of natural language. Vague expressions used in language have their pragmatic functions,which adapt to Jef Verschueren's theory of adaptation.To begin with, based on corpus linguistics, this thesis sets up a mini corpus and adopts George W. Bush's weekly radio addresses as the corpus. The corpus is a self-built mini specialized one. It uses the comparatively formal language because the weekly address is delivered by former American president Bush at that time to all the American citizens, which represents the official's stand. So it is necessary to do research on vague expressions in Bush's addresses.The thesis not only studies the pragmatic function of vague expressions in the corpus from the qualitative perspective, but also makes use of a statistic analytic software—Concordance to analyze the number of times and frequency of vague expressions from the quantitative perspective.By the quantitative study, we find out that: the thesis not only quantitatively analyzes nine types of vague expressions in Bush's addresses, such as vague extent expressions, vague scope expressions, vague moderate expressions, vague frequency expressions, vague personal expressions, vague quantifying expressions, vague likelihood expressions, vague modal verbs and vague indefinite expressions, but also finds out the exact number of times and frequency of every vague expression. This helps people understand Bush's addresses better. The vague expressions whose number of times are bigger than or are equal to 100 times in the corpus are the following ones: more, much, more than, our, we, you, us, your, many, some, million, will, can, must, would, should, could and may. After knowing the figures, when they try to understand Bush's addresses, people will pay more attention to these frequently used vague expressions, which stimulates further understanding of pragmatic functions.Besides, by the qualitative study, it is clear to make a conclusion that different vague expressions show different adaptation. Generally, the use of vague expressions achieves the purpose of adaptability to the mental world, social world, and physical world.