The Pragmatic Analysis Of Vague Language In Public Service Advertising For City Construction

Vagueness, as an intrinsic property of natural language, plays a very important role in human communication. Vague language appears in nearly all kinds of communicative forms, such as news report, diplomatic speeches, commercial negotiations, advertisements and so on. It has permeated all daily communication and we can not afford to ignore them.As the most common and effective tool to influence the public by authority, public service advertising is developing rapidly. You can find numerous PSAs on a street or road of a city. Language, as the main part of PSA, becomes the focus of PSA study. Up to now, there have been many studies on PSA from different perspectives, such as historical study, semiotic study, sociological study and so on. Most of them are macroscopic researches. Though many scholars have studied them at the microscopic levels, most of these studies are limited in other fields rather than the language aspect. Therefore, the author of this paper finds it necessary to further study the language of PSA at a micro-level. Meanwhile, vague language forms a considerable part of the language in PSA. In recent years, great success has been achieved in the study of vague language in literature, linguistics, aesthetics, and translatology. However, its use in the field of advertising, especially in Chinese PSAs, has received little attention. Furthermore, little study has contributed to the pragmatic functions of vague language in daily use. So this paper will study some typical vague language used in Chinese PSAs which are designed for Hefei city construction and further analyze the positive pragmatic functions of the vague language.Since there are numerous PSAs about various social aspects all over the country, the author of this paper will limit the range of PSAs to the ones about the construction of Hefei city. These PSAs are all published with the purpose of constructing Hefei city well, which include PSAs of transportation, cultural civilization, blood donation and environmental protection. Some of these collected PSAs appear in the official webs and forums on the internet. Others are recorded by the author in person when seeing them outdoors. Then the author analyzes all the collected PSAs and sorts out the ones that contain vague language. Totally the author has picked out 40 PSAs that contain vague language and they are numbered from 1 to 40. Then the author studies all the possible vague language in these PSAs and classifies the usage of vague language on different levels, such as word level and sentence level. At last, the author probes into the positive pragmatic functions of those vague language on the basis of three pragmatic theories, namely, cooperative principle, politeness principle and adaptation theory.Through the detailed analysis of PSAs for Hefei city construction, the major findings of this study can be concluded into three points:(1) Public service advertising, as an essential tool of the government to educate the public, really deserves our attention and study. The language used in PSAs for city construction contains a lot of vague expressions. These vague expressions may manifest themselves in many ways, such as words like nouns, adjectives, verbs, classifiers, or sentence structures like metaphor and antithesis.(2) Vague language can exist in PSAs owing to many reasons. These reasons can be objective ones like the indeterminacy of concepts in the world and vagueness of language symbols themselves due to the imbalance in the proportion of symbols and referents. The various subjective ones may be memory loss, PSA writers' unwillingness to be precise, PSA writers'limited konwledge, the indeterminacy of social interaction, etc.(3) The existence of vague language in PSAs has practical pragmatic functions. They can leave public readers extensive imagination room, let PSA language and writers become polite and adaptative to both readers'psychology and PSAs'own features. All these functions can not be achieved by corresponding precise language.The results of this study are of great value to the writing of PSAs and the understanding of PSAs. At the same time, the study has a certain theoretical value. Firstly, for those present and future PSA writers, this study tells them to learn to use vague language effectively in the production process of PSAs. The proper use of vague language can give rise to better PSAs. Secondly, for all the public readers, who meet PSAs in their daily life, this study will make them pay attention to vague language in PSAs when reading them and hold their own yardstick of understanding. In other words, this study helps the public to better understand Chinese PSAs in their daily life. Thirdly, the study also contributes to the theoretical study of vague language to some extent. This study has extended the range of vague language study and enriched the researches on vague language. It has probed into vague language from a new field of PSAs. The material for pragmatic study also has been enlarged.