On the fringes of metaphor: Using ambiguously figurative vague language to pragmatically negotiate sensitive topics in the English as a Medium of Instruction classroom

Abstract

When negotiating sensitive and taboo topics language needs to be used carefully so as not to cause offence or disrupt the interlocutors' relationship. One way to do this is through the use of vague language. In this study, we provide an in-depth, qualitative analysis of vague, euphemistic language, which may be perceived as marginally ‘figurative’, that is used to negotiate taboo and sensitive topics concerning culture, immigration, race and class. We use the term figurative to include metaphor and metonymy. The paper's focus is on linguistic strategies that employ content words which are in turn, ambiguously figurative, vague and de-emphasising, as well as emphatic qualifiers, and hedging signals, that distance the speaker from their words or prepare the listener for figurative language to come, as tuning devices. The data used in the study are from the METCLIL (Alejo-Gonzalez et al., 2021) corpus and comprise two classes of English as a Medium of Instruction (EMI) students in Sweden studying international marketing in a post-graduate program. After a detailed discourse analysis, we show how L2 users exploit the vagueness inherent in ambiguously figurative language (i.e. language that we perceive to be “on the fringes of metaphor”) to discuss complex topics in a pragmatically sensitive manner in ways that expand previously established categories for VL and collapse others.