开放式访谈和半开放式访谈中的模糊语言研究

Chapter 1 Introduction

1.1 Research Background
In human language, accuracy and vagueness exist at the same time. Vague language isclosely related to people’s life and vague language phenomenon appears everywhere. In dailycommunication, people occasionally use precise language to express their own ideas.However, they may always prefer to use vague language to convey information. Humanbeings always have different social purposes, so they often consciously or unconsciously usevague language to meet the needs in real communication. The appropriate application ofvague language in interaction can make the expressions more natural, decent, polite, flexibleand effective. Moreover, the correct application of vague language can express people’semotions and ideas more properly, and help the two parties in communication maintain agood interpersonal relationship and achieve the communicative goals successfully. Forexample, in daily interpersonal communication, “Have you heard that he is going to bepromoted?” “Maybe!” Here the “maybe” is a kind of vague language. On the one hand, if youdo not know whether he is really promoted, “maybe” can save your face; on the other hand, ifyou know that he is going to be promoted, but it has not been determined, and you can notgive an accurate statement, so you can choose the vague language to maintain the goodrelationship between you and him or her. Vagueness is an intrinsic attribute in humanlanguage and it attracts many linguists’ attention. Scholars hold controversial ideas towardvagueness of linguistic; generally, they hold two different points of view: some consider thatthe use of vague language is a bad thing; the others insist that the use of vague language is agood thing which can be helpful in language communication. Different people view thisdisputable subject from different perspectives. Through observing the life phenomenon,collecting and reading the research achievements about vague language, the author finds thatthe vague language phenomena have been studied by domestic and foreign scholars fromdifferent angles and fields.
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1.2 Purpose and Significance of the Study
Based on the classification of vague words, this thesis, comparing the vague words usedin open interview and semi-open interview, adds up the number of vague words; through thesystematic analysis of the vague words in collected corpus, this thesis obtains theusing-frequency of all kinds of vague words and calculates the proportion of each kind ofvague words. After the frequency analysis, this thesis further analyzes the pragmatic functionsof each kind of vague words under the guidance of Adaptation Theory.The purpose of this thesis is to help people to understand that the use of vague languageis not only related to communicative purpose and contextual background, but also related tothe issue that whether the language is affected by the fixed topics or not, which will expandthe scope of the study of vague language. On the other hand, it provides help for people tounderstand the characteristics and functions of vague language and to reasonably and properlyunderstand and learn vague language as well as provides beneficial inspiration for people torealize the communication in real world.
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Chapter 2 Literature Review

2.1 The Definition of Vague Language
As early as a few centuries ago, vagueness attracted Plato, Descartes, Hume, Russell andother philosophers’interests; Peirce is generally considered as the first founder who attemptedto rigorously define vague language. For the concept of language, he actually believes thatvague is fuzzy, and vagueness is caused by uncertain language. The notion is as follows:A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which itis intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, hewould have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition. Byintrinsically uncertain we mean not uncertain in consequence of any ignorance of theinterpreter, but because the speaker’s habits of language were as excluding, anotheras admitting, those states of things. Yet this must be understood, to have reference towhat might be deduced from a perfect knowledge of his state of mind; for it isprecisely because these questions never did, or did not frequently, present themselvesthat his habit remained indeterminate.[1]
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2.2 The Classification of Vague Language
As a significant part of language, vague language is mainly represented by various vagueexpressions which can be divided into different types on the basis of different standards.Kempson makes a classification on the basis of function from the perspective ofsemantics, and classifies vague expressions into the following four types:The first type of vague expression refers to the lexical item with clear meanings,while the meaning will be vague when applied to certain objects. In other words, the lexicalitem has referential vagueness.[9]Take the lexical item “night” and “evening” as the examples.The definition of “evening” is “the part of the day between the afternoon and the time you goto bed” and the definition of “night” is “the time between one day and the next when it is dark,when people usually sleep”, according to Oxford Advanced Learner’s Dictionary, in otherwords, “night” is to some extent later than “evening”. But actually, it is difficult for people todecide “what time is evening?” and “what time is night?” and it is hard to say the exactborderline between “evening” and “night” as the result of the fact that different peopleholding different perceptions.
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Chapter 3 Research Design and Theoretical Framework .........15
3.1 Research Design ......15
3.1.1 Research Questions.....15
3.1.2 Data Collection....15
3.1.3 Research Methods and Procedures .....18
3.2 Theoretical Framework......19
3.2.1 Three Properties of Language.....19
3.2.2 Four Elements of Contextual Correlates of Adaptability .........21
Chapter 4 Analyses and Discussion ......24
4.1 Frequency Analyses of the Data .......24
4.2 Pragmatic Analyses of the Data ........30
4.2.1 Vague Words Adapting to the Interior World .....31
4.2.2 Vague Words Adapting to the Outside World .....36
Chapter 5 Conclusion .......42
5.1 Major Findings .........42
5.2 Limitations of the Study and Suggestions ......43

Chapter 4 Analyses and Discussion

4.1 Frequency Analyses of the Data
The research takes chi-square test of statistic major to test the efficiency of the data. Thesignificant level selected in this thesis is 5%; if the difference of P-value is less than 5%, thenit will be considered statistically valid. The author rewrites the audio recordings into text, andclassifies the vague words in the text according to table 4-1. And then the author asks onestudent who is at the same major to check the text. Through the examination, it is found thatthe accuracy between the tape recording and the rewriting text is 99%. Besides, the authoralso asks another student to classify the vague words in the text; through the comparison, it isfound that the accuracy between the student’s classification and the author’s classification is95%, the remaining 5% is finally classified through repeated consideration.This thesis is based on such an assumption that the fixed topic will influence theusing-frequency of vague language in open interview and semi-open interview. The above hasmentioned that the difference between two kinds of interviews is that the topics in openinterview are not fixed, and the topics in semi-open interview are centered on a fixed topic.The author will comparatively analyze the collected vague words in the corpus in this part.

Conclusion

Through learning from other linguists’ researches about vagueness, this thesis analyzesthe using-frequency of vague language in open interview and semi-open interview and theirpragmatic functions under the guidance of the Adaptation Theory. This chapter states themajor findings, discusses the limitations of this study, and finally gives some suggestions forfurther study.Language is a useful tool for communicating and expressing ourselves. In the developingprocess of human languages, the appearance of languages is a feature of the stage; peoplehave been exploring the essence of language throughout the process. As a communication tool,language should be clearer and more accurate. At the same time, for open interview andsemi-open interview, both accuracy and vagueness are essential. Therefore, people shouldconsider the vagueness of language when they communicate in interview.According to Zhang Qiao’s classification, the author counts the number of the vaguewords used in open interview and semi-open interview, calculates and analyzes theusing-frequency of these vague words in the corpus by SPSS(Statistical Product and ServiceSolution) software.There are six types of vague words in this thesis. There are 106 approximators and vaguequantifiers such as “五六千”, “左右”, “一两个”etc; 95 possibility and plausibility indicatorssuch as “可能”, “有可能”, “也许”etc.;96 vague category identifiers such as “考试啊（什么的）”, “（回家）或者是什么的”etc.; 353 intensifiers such as “很”, “特别”, “挺”, “太”etc.; 66de-intensifiers such as “点”, “有点”, “一些”etc.;216 subjectiviers such as “我感觉”, “我认为”, “我的意思是”etc.
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References (omitted)