The Comparative Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In The Remarks Of The Chinese And American Spokesmen From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

Vagueness can be seen as the words or sentences that have more than one meaning from the perspective of semantics; however from the perspective of pragmatics, it refers to the linguistic phenomenon that when the speaker is able to use direct expressions in language communication, he consciously chooses the vague ones to achieve the specific communicative purposes. As a kind of communicative strategy, pragmatic vagueness is commonly used in the daily communication especially in the diplomatic languages.On the basis of Verschueren’s adaptation theory, the thesis makes a comparison of the differences in the use of pragmatic vagueness in the remarks of Chinese and American spokesmen. The thesis mainly deals with the following questions:(1) what kinds of pragmatic vagueness are employed in the speech of Chinese and American spokesmen?(2) What are the similarities and differences in the remarks of Chinese and American spokesmen? In order to make a detailed research about the pragmatic vagueness, the author collects different kinds of corpus from the website of Ministry of Foreign Affairs of the People’s Republic of China and the White House.gov. The thesis first analyzes the use of pragmatic vagueness on the lexical level and syntactic level. As for the adaptation to the context, the thesis discusses it from the “three worlds” that are mental world, social world and physical world. After a careful collection about the data, the thesis draws the following conclusions:(1) For the sake of “face” or the politeness, the pragmatic vagueness is widely used by the spokesmen to achieve their special communicative purposes.(2) The use of vagueness on the lexical level is more often than that on the syntactic level. Chinese spokesman uses more vague words on the syntactic level while American spokesman utilizes more on the lexical level.The comparison of the different strategies between Chinese and American spokesmen can make us understand the real meaning the spokesmen want to convey, which is of great importance in learning the diplomatic languages.