A Functional Grammar-Based Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In Obama's Speeches

Vagueness is one of the intrinsic properties of natural language and language users can express their very thoughts politely through vague language.Hence,vague language is widely used in daily communication.Since Zadeh published his paper — Fuzzy Sets,the researches on vague language have attracted more and more attention from scholars,which mainly focus on the definitions to pragmatic vagueness and semantic vagueness,the differences and connections between pragmatic vagueness and semantic vagueness.As the term itself implies,pragmatic vagueness pays more attention to the pragmatic functions of vague language.Scholars' achievements on pragmatic vagueness studies at home and abroad permeate into various aspects,like legal language,advertising language,diplomatic language and literary language,etc.The characteristics of leaders' speeches tend to be more formal and reserved.Besides,the words in leaders' speeches are carefully selected,which are often than not decent and implicit.Scholars are of particular interest to expound the phenomenon of pragmatic vagueness in leader's speeches.However,most of the researches on pragmatic vagueness are limited to the perspectives such as Principle of Politeness,cognition and communication,vagueness strategies and Relevance-Adaptation Theory,etc.There are relatively fewer scholars who attempt to explore pragmatic vagueness from the perspective of Functional Grammar.Accordingly,Functional Grammar provides a wider and multiple perspective for the researches on pragmatic vagueness.Halliday's Functional Grammar serves as an explanation as to how words are composed together to fulfill communicative purpose.In Functional Grammar,Halliday generalizes language function into three meta-functions.This thesis,based on Functional Grammar,intends to analyze pragmatic vagueness in Obama's speeches from the aspects of classification,transformation,mood,modality and cohesion respectively,aiming at interpreting the way pragmatic vag ueness is employed to achieve the communicative effect.The research shows that pragmatic vagueness is presented at lexical,sentence and discourse level in Obama's speeches,especially at lexical level.Pragmatic vagueness in leaders' speeches can not only ensure the accuracy to make leader speeches more convincing,but also avoid sensitive information so that conflicts can be obviated.Additionally,the analysis demonstrates that Functional Grammar has explanatory power for the mechanism as to how pragmatic vagueness realize communicative intention,which in a certain sense broadens the research field of Functional Grammar.