A Frame Semantic Comparison Of The Vague Language In Inquiry And Re-inquiry Letters

Since vague language was introduced and analyzed first by L.A.Zadeh in1965, muchhas been investigated systematically and descriptively, but not many research focus on thevague language in business correspondence. Vagueness, as an effective means to conveyepistemic modality, attitude and purpose, plays a vital role in business correspondence’swriting. The use of vagueness by businessmen might be problematic and demands specialattention. The Thesis aims to explore the use of vagueness in business correspondence(based on50inquiry letters and50re-inquiry letters) and find out the underlying factorsinfluencing the differences and similarities existing between inquiry and re-inquiry letters.Based on Hyland and Varttala (1996)’s classification and the pretest on thedistribution of vague language, the author puts forward the classification of vagueness,containing epistemic words (modal verbs, epistemic adjective and adverbs, epistemic verbsand epistemic nouns)and epistemic constructions (if-clauses, passive structure andattribution shields). According to the categories of vague language, the corpora areclassified and applied to calculate the frequencies and percentage of vagueness in inquiryand re-inquiry letters and the results are listed as follows:(1) the rank orders and types ofvague expressions in two corpora are almost the same, and both two sides prefer to useepistemic adjectives and adverbs and modal verbs;(2) sellers tend to use more vaguelanguage in re-inquiry letters than buyers, leaving an impression of politeness, sincerityand credibility on buyers, reducing the force of assertion and subjectivity and evenavoiding bearing the responsibility of some accidents and emergencies;(3) the possiblefactors influencing the differences of use of vague language between sellers and buyers(native English writers and Chinese writers) may be attributed to different culturalprototypes and cognitive perspectives, such as social values, thinking modes, economicsituations, the buyer’s or seller’s perspective.