On Interactional Strategy Of Vagueness In Verbal Communication

Abstract: Vagueness is a fundamental and pervasive feature of natural language. Asan essential feature of every human language, it marks a certain gap between thelanguage and the real world due to limited cognitive capacities. Therefore, vaguenessis often seen as a deplorable deviation from precision and clarity. In recent years,researchers at home and abroad have carried out widespread studies on vagueness, butmore thorough and more comprehensive researches have seldom been made on theinteractional strategy of vagueness in verbal communication. Therefore, this thesisaims to analyze the reasons why vague expressions are pervasive in the verbalcommunication, and further more to discuss how vague expressions serve asinteractional strategy in the verbal communication under the framework of RelevanceTheory, trying to make some complementary discussion on vagueness to the previousstudies.With the aid of Relevance Theory, this thesis utilizes a large amount of cases toanalyze the reasons why vague expressions are pervasive in the verbal communication,explore ways in which vague expressions guide the listener to an interpretation thatbest fits the speaker’s intentions for the addressee and focus on the interactionalstrategy of vagueness in verbal communication. Vague expressions are used regularlyin everyday conversations owing to the speaker’s lack of information, the speaker’sconscious vagueness and more relevant contextual implications conveyed by vagueexpressions than a precise expression would do, and they rarely lead to detectablemisunderstandings. Instead, they can achieve the greatest positive effect with the leastprocessing efforts to ensure the efficient interaction. Furthermore, it is concluded thatvagueness could help the speaker to realize the communicative goal and interaction,and rational and appropriate use of vagueness would greatly enhance the efficiency,accuracy and diversity of verbal communication.