On Vague Expressions In Friends

“vagueness”，as a basic feature of natural language has been playing a vital roleduring the verbal communication.Based on the corpus linguistic theory, we see all the lines in FRIENDS from10seasons as our research materials. It is just like a mini corpus. The discourse ofFRIENDS which is a sitcom are all informal.We are not only analyze the generation methods of vague expressions andfunctions of them, but also analyze the number of time appeared in the drama bystatistic analytic software-Antconc3.2.2.The research procedure is as follows: first, we analyze the generation methods ofvague expressions from2aspects–scope vagueness and hedges. And get the statisticsof the words. Then we divides vague expressions into6categories: Vague FrequencyExpressions, Vague Personal Expressions, Vague Quantifying Expressions, VagueLikelihood Expressions, Vague Modal Verbs and Vague Indefinite Expressions.(Other2categories have already been discussed above.) We make the times appeared in thissitcom of every word in every category clear. This can help us to know the lines inFRIENDS better. The vague expressions which appear in the sitcom more than500times are “something”,“thing（s）”,“stuff”,“anything”,“maybe”,“about”,“around”,“like”,“I think”,“I know”,“I mean”,“some”,“little” and so on. With these statistics,people would pay more attention to the vague expressions. And offer data for thefurther research of pragmatics.Also, the active and negative roles that pragmatic vagueness plays are discussedin this thesis. Pragmatic vagueness in people’s verbal communication plays anirreplaceable role. It is hoped that it could shed a little light on the research ofpragmatic vagueness and give several implications to the interpersonalcommunication. What’s more, the author hopes that it could make contribution to thebetter translation of Friends.