A Study On Fuzzy Language In Chinese Weather Report From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation

Ever since the late1970s when an American expert at information control, L.A. Zadeh, published an article "Fuzzy Sets", fuzziness has become a scientific term which is widely investigated and explored in many fields of study. A great number of experts and scholars both in China and abroad have been conducting investigations and research on fuzziness from the perspectives of philosophy, logic, psychology, linguistics and so on. In the field of linguistics, fuzziness in various kinds of discourses is studied from the perspectives of lexicology, cognitive linguistics, semantics, pragmatics and so on, and rich achievements both in theoretical and empirical research have been made. As one kind of discourse, linguistic studies on weather report are relatively scarce due to its particular practical value, and investigations into fuzzy language in Chinese weather report are even rare.For quite a long time, people have been used to paying attention to the practical value of weather report, ignoring the analytical value of such a particular type of discourse in the field of linguistics. Although scholars have already made attempts to explore the language phenomena in weather report from various perspectives, such as communication studies, stylistics, systemic-functional linguistics and pragmatics, studies on fuzzy language in Chinese weather report are relatively scarce. This thesis is conducted by means of qualitative research method, and it aims at interpreting fuzzy language in Chinese weather report from the perspective of pragmatics with Jef Verschueren’s Contextual Adaptation as the theoretical framework. In this thesis, the author has randomly selected36monthly Chinese weather reports from2008to2010, which are transcribed into texts from those online videos. They are the data of the present study which are analyzed to investigate the features of fuzzy language in Chinese weather report, how fuzzy language adapts to the contextual correlates in the mental world, the social world and the physical world in Chinese weather report and to explore the pragmatic functions of fuzzy language use during its adaptation process to the contextual correlates.Based on the present study in this thesis, the author finds that the fuzziness property of Chinese weather report language is quite typical, and fuzzy language in Chinese weather report can be classified into seven groups according to the concept it conveys, namely fuzzy language conveying the concept of time, space, quantity and change, the concept of information sources, the concept of attribute differences of elements and the concept of degree differences of elements; the use and choice-making of fuzzy language in Chinese weather report is the product of weather reporters’ and relevant meteorological departments’ adaptation to the contextual correlates in the mental world, the social world and the physical world; fuzzy language can be employed to have positive pragmatic functions in Chinese weather report, namely the use of fuzzy language can help to protect the speakers themselves and it can meanwhile help to achieve speakers’expressive accuracy, flexibility, efficiency as well as their expressive aesthetic. The author expects that through the tentative analysis of fuzzy language in Chinese weather report in this thesis, people will be able to focus on its language features and investigate them in addition to the focus of its practical value to human life, In this way, Chinese weather report can be understood and interpreted from a new linguistic perspective, and people will have a better understanding of weather report information and its language features. Based on the present study, the author also expects that this will give people an insight into their attempts to make appropriate use of fuzzy language in their daily life and to achieve ideal communicative effects in their interaction.