A Cognitive Study On Diplomatic Vague Language Based On The Conceptual Integration Theory(CIT)

Recently, vagueness has attracted many linguists’ attention. Inevitably, it has been a hot topic. What is vagueness? Just as its name implies, it is a vague language. Besides preciseness, it is also a natural characteristic of nature language. The characteristics of vagueness include preciseness, politeness, indeterminacy and variability. Although people aren’t willing to admit, vague language is always with them.In diplomatic occasions, sometimes politicians aren’t able to express their opinions and views directly. At this moment, diplomatic vague language plays an important role. It can leave some space to hearers so that hearers can make choices by themselves. In fact, diplomatic vague language is vague on the surface, but clear under it. In order to avoid conflict, politicians can use this linguistic strategy. The realization of diplomatic vague language mainly focuses on the le xical, syntactic and discourse level. Its distinctive characteristics lie in: circumlocution, implication, vagueness, eclecticism and tautology.Previously, diplomatic vague language was mostly studied from the perspective of pragmatics(such as cooperative principle and politeness principle). They mainly studied implied meaning and communicative functions instead of meaning production mechanism. This thesis, based on conceptual integration theory, a new perspective, studies the meaning production mechanism of vague language. Through the integrating process and integrating networks of conceptual integration theory, it ’s clear to see the meaning production mechanism.This thesis is about the cognitive study on diplomatic vague language based on conceptual integration theory. Its corpus stems from vague phenomena in diplomatic language. During the period of occupying as the premier(2003-2012), Premier Wen convened ten press conferences of this kind in total. Every press conference lasted at least two and a half hours, with 149 questioned followed by answers. The corpus of this thesis derives from the texts of Premier Wen’s press conferences. According to the characteristics of networks of CIT, these examples are classified effectively.After studying those texts, the author concludes that conceptual integration theory has a great exploratory force to interpret diplomatic vague language, and the meaning production process in detail, which provides a completely new perspective. Diplomatic vague language can be analyzed based on conceptual integration theory, not only from the perspective of pragmatics such as violated principles, implied meanings and communicative function.