The Pragmatic Analysis Of Vague Language In English Business Letters

The phenomenon that language has the property of vagueness has aroused people’s attention for a long time, but it was not until1965that the concept of "vagueness" and its theory were put forwarded by Zadeh---a very famous American scientist---in his one paper entitled Fuzzy Sets which is related with mathematics. Then gradually, people commenced to conduct some systematic and descriptive researches on vague language, especially on the semantic aspect, but relatively rare about its application. The English business writing is just one field of the application of vague language.As one significant document of the trade, business letters have utmost relationships with the two parties, because of which the language in them are expected to be precise and rigorous so as to avoid the economic loss caused by adopting the vague language. The traditional principle of7Cs also requires that the language in business letters should be clear and definite. However, after a careful analysis of many English business samples, the author finds that vague language is widely adopted. Therefore, the author conducts this thesis with the purpose of making a study and analysis about this phenomenon. Meanwhile, some research methods, such as theoretical application, corpus collection and corpus analysis and so on are also adopted in this research.Chapter One just gives a brief introduction to the background, reasons and significance and so on of the research.The current research mainly studies the vague language in the business letter, so in the first part of Chapter Two, the author makes a presentation of vague language from the philosophical and pragmatic perspectives, and then makes a contrast between vagueness and the related terms of fuzziness, ambiguity and generality. In the second part of this chapter, the classifications and the principles of the business letters are carefully described.In Chapter Three, the author gives a detailed description of the theoretical foundation of this paper, namely, Adaptation Theory and Politeness Principle, which is of great importance for the development of the research.In Chapter Four, the author adopts the methods of analysis and induction in the study of the employment of the vague language in the18selected business letters. After the analysis, the author finds that vague language is employed in different types of English business letters with different frequencies. To be specific, among various business letters adopted in this paper, the frequency in good-news letters and neutral-news letters is the lowest, while those in bad-news letters and persuasive letters are higher. According to the data analysis, it is undoubtedly the frequency of vague language appearing in the letters is decided, to a large extent, by their nature. It is the presentation of the adaptation to the addresser’s communicative purposes and politeness motivations. The purpose of the addresser’ preference for vague language in business letters is to fulfill his communicative intentions in some specific business contexts. Moreover, vague language is frequently employed as adaptation to the politeness motivations so that the faces of both the addresser and the addressee can be saved in certain situations.Besides, this current thesis also greatly stresses on analyzing the basic four pragmatic functions of the vague language in the English business letters, namely:(1) strengthening the accuracy and appropriateness of the language use;(2) making the expression more polite and alleviating the embarrassment;(3) making the business language more flexible and (4) achieving self-protectionIn Chapter Six, the author restates the major findings of this paper, mentions the limitations and then puts forward some suggestions for the future study.This research is of great help for people to pay more attention to the phenomenon of the application of vague language in English business letters and have a better understanding of it, which make the communicators use vague language more effectively in the communication, guarantee business communication to be smoothly carried out and in the end realize their communicative intentions.