{ / [ Oh ] Not a < ^ Lot > }: Discourse Intonation and Vague Language

Abstract

Vague language (VL) is defined variously in the literature. VL has been referred to by scholars as ‘fuzziness, vague language, generality, ambiguity and even ambivalence’ (He 2000, p. 7), as ‘vague language’ (Channell 1994) and ‘vague expressions’ (Carter and McCarthy 1997), while others talk of ‘imprecision’ or ‘imprecise language use’ (Crystal and Davy 1975, pp. 112–14; Dubois 1987). Stubbs (1996, p. 202) places ‘vague language and lack of commitment’ in opposition to ‘certainty and commitment’; VL is equated with uncertainty. VL, as described by Cheng and Warren (2003, pp. 394–5), covers a closed set of identifiable items which are inherently imprecise, and which the participants interpret based on an understanding of what the speaker is indicating: that what is said is not to be interpreted precisely. In other words, VL can be interpreted without recourse to judgements based on the particular context in which they occur. They argue that given that the precise meaning cannot be retrieved by the hearer, the successful use of VL requires the participants in the discourse to have a shared understanding of the relative status of a particular set of vague items. For the purposes of this study, in line with Cheng and Warren (2003), VL refers to language which has an inherently unspecified, or underspecified, meaning in the context in which it occurs.