Pragmatic Functions Of Vagueness In Business Negotiations

Vagueness, as an intrinsic feature of the language, has been paid more and more attention by the learners. The vagueness refers to the form of language whose concepts of linguistic expressions do not have sharply defined boundaries, or the natural language that has vagueness as its inherent property. The vagueness, which is taken as an important part and a common sense to reflect the objective world and express the result of people's ideas, has spread to appear and been applied in many fields. Although this phenomenon has already been done from many approaches, there are less done deeply and systematically from the value and positive pragmatic functions of vagueness in the business negotiations. Followed the previous research, this thesis is based on Relevance Theory, and focus on the application and pragmatic functions of vagueness in business negotiations.Sperber & Wilson thought that the hearer does not need to infer all the logical and contextual implications of the speaker, but only needs to find the most relevant information and achieve the purpose of communication. Under this circumstance, the speaker doesn't have to be one hundred percent precise, but only needs to make the hearer able to infer the communicated information, but the prerequisite is that the speaker must suppose the hearer can infer the information. For the speakers, they use vagueness to confirm to optimal relevance in that it can achieve the greatest contextual effects with the least processing effort, so it is corresponded with the relevance principle.For the practical use, collecting a lot of examples of the vagueness applying in the business negotiations, mainly discuss the explanational power for the vagueness in the view of Relevance Theory, especially for that people using vagueness mutual related to achieve their goals. Through classifying different pragmatical functions, this thesis analyze the value which the vagueness showed in the business negotiation, revealing the positive and negative functions of this phenomenon. This thesis also apply Relevance Theory to the factors affecting the smoothly process of business negotiations, and as for this, provide several strategies.