An Analysis Of Pragmatic Vagueness In Verbal Communication Between The Owners And Developers

Pragmatic vagueness refers to the speaker use the same words in a particular context to convey two or more indirect meaning to the hearer,so that the speaker's intention has vagueness and uncertainty.In the 1990 s,the study of pragmatic vagueness is highly valued by domestic scholars.Pragmatic vagueness has drawn many researchers' attention and has been studied in different kinds of fields,such as anthropology,psychology,linguistic and so on.However,the research on pragmatic vagueness is relatively loose at present.The combination of co-operative principle and relevance theory breaks through the limitations of pragmatic vagueness and provides a solid theoretical foundation for us to understand pragmatic vagueness.In the perspective of co-operation principle and relevance theory,this thesis analyzes the understanding mechanism of pragmatic vagueness.The thesis selects 20 dialogues from audio and on-line chats between the owners and developers and primarily adopts qualitative analysis and summarized method.These 20 dialogues are respectively assigned to the co-operative principle and relevance theory.After that,five fragments are extracted from the 20 dialogues and elaborate the construction process of hedges.In the process of understanding pragmatic vagueness,the cognitive and explanatory power of co-operative principle and relevance theory are verified.The thesis is trying to answer the following three questions:(1)According to dialogue analysis between the owners and developers,what are the classifications of pragmatic vagueness?(2)What are the production reasons of pragmatic vagueness under the environment of communication between the owners and developers?(3)According to the dialogues between the owners and developers,how to analyze hedges under co-operative principle and relevance theory?Through the analysis and discussion based on the co-operative principle and relevance theory,we can draw the following conclusion:(1)In the process of understanding pragmatic vagueness,there are three essential categories: the objectivity,subjectivity and the combination of objectivity and subjectivity of pragmatic vagueness.These three categories are necessary prerequisites for understanding of pragmatic vagueness successfully.(2)According to the locus of vagueness and way of generation to identify the production reasons of pragmatic vagueness.Based on the four maxims of co-operative principle,the author clarifies that the quality maxim is between observance and violation,but the latter three maxims are violations.(3)In verbal communication,the speaker uses hedges to convey information.On the surface,it violates the co-operative principle and reduces the amount of information of communication,but in fact,it follows the principle of co-operative principle and enhances the relevance of the discourse to ensure the smooth progress of the conversation.This thesis analyzes the pragmatic vagueness from the perspective of co-operative principle and relevance theory,and proves that the feasibility of the co-operative principle and relevance theory in the analysis from single sentence to text.In addition,this thesis provides a new perspective for the study of verbal communication and helps the use of pragmatic vagueness under other conditions.