A Pragmatic Analysis Of Vagueness In The Press Conferences Delivered By Prime Minister Cameron

Being one tool for human communication, clearness and preciseness is not onlyone of the requirements of the traditional linguistics to verbal communication, butalso the ideal state of a successful communication. However, there is large amount ofvagueness in daily communication. The appropriate employment of vaguenesssometimes can be more convincing and more receptive than clear and preciselanguage, and accordingly, it can be more effective in achieving a successfulcommunication. However, the improper use of vagueness will have negative effectsand lead to the failure in communication. There is large amount of vagueness in dailycommunication, diplomatic language, news report, literary works, advertisinglanguage, articles of law and trade English. Therefore, the vague phenomenon attractsan increasing number of scholars’ attention in recent years. In general, the majority ofrelated researches have been done from the perspective of translation, cognitivelinguistics, systemic functional linguistics, so on and so forth, and by far fruitfulachievements have come into prominence. However, there are few researches onvagueness made from the pragmatic perspective of Cooperative Principle, PolitenessPrinciple and Face Theory, which is a scope to be broadened.Accordingly, this thesis attempts to make a research from the pragmaticperspective of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Face Theory, with thequalitative analysis as the major method and the quantitative analysis as asupplementary method, and collects the scripts of Prime Minister Cameron’s remarksin the press conference as data to make an exploration of the reasons, purposes andcommunicative functions of the adoption of vagueness in the press conferencelanguage. Through the quantitative analysis of73Prime Minister Cameron’s answersin10scripts in the press conferences, it is found that vagueness is frequentlyemployed in various forms. Based on the previous studies on the vague language, thisthesis employs Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Conversational Implicature toexplain how Prime Minister Cameron violates the four maxims of CooperativePrinciple and produces conversational implicature in the specific context of the press conference. Meanwhile, this thesis adopts Leech’s Politeness Principle and its sixmaxims as well as Brown and Levinson’s Face Theory to clarify how Prime MinisterCameron saves the hearers’ face and shows politeness to the hearers by employingvagueness.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter1is the introduction of theresearch background, purposes and significance. Chapter2introduce the theoreticalframework of this study and makes a literature review of previous researches at homeand abroad. Chapter3tries to analyze vagueness in Prime Minister Cameron’sremarks in the press conference from the perspective of Cooperative Principle andexplores the reasons for the production of conversational implicature. Chapter4makes an exploration of purposes and significance of vagueness in the pressconference language from the perspective of Politeness Principle and concludes thecommunicative functions of the employment of vagueness. Chapter5draws aconclusion to the whole research and manifests the findings, as well as the limitationsof current study and the reflections for future research.