Pragmatic Vagueness In Barack Obama’s Weekly Radio Addresses From A Perspective Of Relevance Theory

Vagueness is an intrinsic property of language. When it comes to the functions ofvagueness in language, its pragmatic function can be taken as an extrinsic property.Since Zadeh published his paper Fuzzy Sets in Information and Control in1965,linguistic vagueness has attracted more and more attention. In actual communication,the vague language is used by speaker on purpose, aiming at achieving some specialcommunicative goals, which thus brings about pragmatic vagueness. Essentially, it isa cognitive phenomenon.Pragmatic vagueness has been studied deeply in various aspects, including thelanguage of medicine, laws, advertisements, literature discourses and so on.Meanwhile, it is also interpreted by linguists from different perspectives. However,most studies are from the perspective of “semantics”, while fewer are from bothpragmatic perspective and cognitive perspective. With the flourishing study incognitive linguistics, cognitive theory and approaches are applied to the research ofvague linguistics. Based on the fruitful achievements on this topic, the present thesisaims to analyze and study pragmatic vagueness in Obama’s weekly radio addresses.Totally sixty weekly radio addresses of Obama from the year of2009to2011areselected as the data of this study. By means of qualitative and quantitative analyses,this thesis sets out to find out some typical kinds of pragmatic vagueness and typicalexpressions of these kinds that occur in Obama’s weekly radio addresses; explain howvarious kinds of pragmatic vagueness are employed and conceptualized; find out whatthe real purposes of the use of pragmatic vagueness from the perspective of RelevanceTheory.The results show that pragmatic vagueness prevails in Obama’s weekly radioaddresses which further prove the ubiquitous existence of pragmatic vagueness. Fourmain kinds of pragmatic vagueness are used to express vague concepts in order toachieve pragmatic functions: fuzzy continuum, taxonomic category, nomenclativeevaluation, and hedging in discourses. The quantitative analysis shows that four kindsof pragmatic vagueness vary in their distributions and frequency which imply different cognitive effects of their relevance. The occurring of pragmatic vagueness isa process of cognitive inference and the positive vagueness intensifies the cognitionand the relevance in the communication. Meanwhile, it is discovered that thepragmatic vagueness in Obama’s weekly radio addresses which results from thecommon cognitive environment and the comprehension of the abstract concepts areconceptualized by the concrete things in the real world. The exploration of thesignificance of relevance in pragmatic vagueness behind Obama’s weekly radioaddresses can help us understand the functions in the political discourses of this kind.To some extent, the findings in the study can be applied to language communicationand language teaching.