Pragmatic Vagueness In Chinese And American News Reports-From The Perspective Of Systemic Functional Grammar

It is commonly believed that ideal language involves clarity and precision and that vagueness and imprecision are failure to be avoided whenever possible. However, in reality it is not quite such a case. Vague language permeates our daily communication. As an integral component and inherent property of natural language, vagueness inevitably appears in many public discourses such as political statements, law documents, newspapers, magazines and advertisements, etc. Considered as kinds of linguistic communication, they are typical examples of "language in use" and efficient tools to influence public opinions, playing a significant part in constituting ideologies as well as developing people's attitudes and cognition.News report, a type of public discourse, is produced under certain social conditions and ideological backgrounds. It is the report of the facts that happened recently. Its primary function is to keep people informed of the facts recently happened. A single event can be quite differently reported to express the stances and attitudes of reporters from different social backgrounds. To ensure a successful communication with such a purpose, reporters rack their brains in choosing linguistic forms while reporting. However, pragmatic vagueness is not a bad practice.Pragmatic vagueness, which greatly reflects the speaker's pragmatic awareness, is not only a special language phenomenon but also a pragmatic strategy. It is a universal feature in verbal communication, news report is no exception. Its existence in English news is not accidental, but the news reporters consciously make choices of language. In this paper, Halliday's Functional Grammar is applied as its theoretical framework. The author qualitatively and quantitatively analyzes the manipulation of language in the 40 news reports which are retrieved from "China Daily" (English version), "People's Daily" (English version) "The New York Times" and "Times" from the perspective of ideational function and interpersonal function, and explores the devices of pragmatic vagueness in Chinese and American news reports at three levels, i.e. classification, transformation and modality. By comparatively analysis, the author has found on the one hand that there are similarities and differences in choosing devices of pragmatic vagueness when Chinese and American writers report the news on the same topic. But similarities outweigh differences between the two sets of news report; on the other hand, demonstrates the feasibility of applying functional grammar to analyze pragmatic vagueness in news report. Moreover, the research on pragmatic vagueness is presented in a new light, further enriching the previous studies, providing some inspiration to a certain extent so as to increase people's language awareness and cultivate people's reading ability in critical thinking.