A Study Of Vague Language In Emergency Reports Under Adaptation-Relevsance Model

News report is an important means for people to know what is happening, and to study the use of language in news report helps to deepen our understanding of these happenings. Vague expressions appear widely in news report although preciseness is an important principle of news report. This study focuses on the use of vague language in English reports of Chinese emergencies. This study applies the Relevance-Adaptation Model proposed by Chinese scholars Yang Ping and Ran Yongping. This pragmatic model is based on the complementarity between Relevance Theory and Adaptation Theory. Vague language in many kinds of writings has attracted scholars’ attention, but there is a deficiency of research on vague language in news report, especially there has not been a study of vague language in a particular type of news report. This paper tries to analyze the use of vague language in English reports of Chinese emergencies. The interpretative qualitative research methodology is applied to conduct this research. The data come from reports of traffic accidents and meteorological disasters in China Daily in2010and2011.With reference to previous studies of vague language, this study focuses on the following questions. The first question is about reasons for the existence of vague expressions in English reports of Chinese emergencies. This question will be discussed from three aspects: complexity of the physical world, vague thinking model of human being and principles of emergency reports. The second question is about forms of vague language in English reports of Chinese emergencies, and this question will be discussed at lexical and syntactic levels. The third question is about the relevance-orientation of vagueness. As a sort of linguistic communication, news report aims to convey information effectively and achieve optimal relevance. The fourth question is contextual correlates of vague expressions, i.e. adaptations of vague language to language users, physical world, social world and mental world. Adaptation to language users here means adaptation to utterer’s many voices and interpreters. Adaptation to physical world here means adaptation to the dynamic feature of physical world. Adaptation to social world here refers to adaptation to Chinese culture and the norm of maintaining people’s privacy. Adaptation to mental world here refers to adaptation to readers’ reading habit, motivation and emotion. The fifth question concerns pragmatic functions of vague language in English reports of Chinese emergencies. By exploring these questions, this thesis aims to indicate the objectivity, rationality and pragmatic functions of vague language in English reports of Chinese emergencies and at the same time demonstrate the explanatory force of Relevance-Adaptation Model. Hopefully the thesis could make a contribution to the study of Relevance-Adaptation Model and vague language in emergency reports under this model.