Թեմա - Vague approximators as vague language identifiers
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Chapter 1
Vagueness and the World. Philosophical View of Vagueness
Chapter 2
Linguistic view of Vagueness
2.1. Structural Peculiarities of Approximators
2.1. Pragmatic Aspect of the Category of Approximators
Conclusion
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When we speak or write, we are rarely very clear, precise, or explicit about what we mean and are vague, indirect, and unclear about just what we are committed to.
Vagueness is often seen as a deplorable deviation from precision and clarity. Nevertheless in some cases vague expressions may be more effective than precise ones in conveying the intended meaning of an utterance. That is, they may carry more relevant contextual implications than would a precise expression do. In characterising events and experiences, they may indicate a closer or looser assignment of a characteristic to a conceptual category. For expressing quantities, they may convey the speaker’s attitude about the quantity itself, and they may convey assumptions about the speaker’s and/or the hearer’s beliefs. They may be used to directly express the degree of commitment a speaker makes to a proposition, or they may convey other propositional attitudes such as newsworthiness and personal evaluation more indirectly. Finally, they may serve social functions such as engendering camaraderie and softening implicit criticisms.
In Chapter 1, entitled “Vagueness in the World”, we will consider some aspects of the notion of vagueness from the philosophical point of view.
In Chapter 2, “Linguistic View of Vagueness”, we will dwell upon the linguistic aspects of the notion of vagueness and the use of approximators in practice. The examples are taken mainly from fiction.
Mount Everest has vague boundaries: some rocks are neither clearly part of Everest nor clearly not part of Everest. Is Everest therefore a vague object? Or is only the name ‘Everest’ vague? If the name is vague, is it a vague object, since names are objects too? In what sense, if any, is all vagueness mind-dependent? Raised in a theoretical vacuum, such questions quickly produce confusion.
All in all, one may say that the philosophical question of what the best theoretical treatment of vagueness is has been the subject of much philosophical debate. One theoretical approach is that of fuzzy logic, developed by American mathematician Lotfi Zadeh. Fuzzy logic proposes a gradual transition between "perfect falsity", for example, the statement "Bill Clinton is bald", to "perfect truth", for, say, "Patrick Stewart is bald".
The interest in the use of vague expressions has recently been extended from informal conversation to other contexts, all traditionally associated with a need for precise language. Koester (2007) found vague expressions occurring in workplace meetings and training sessions, Rowland (2007) in mathematics classrooms, Adolphs, Atkins and Harvey (2007) in healthcare settings, and Cotterill (2007) in courtrooms.
These various approaches have pointed to a great variety of motives in using hedging devices, for instance, face-saving strategies intended to obtain speaker’s or writer’s acceptance,
mitigation and modification of utterances, avoidance of commitment and intentional vagueness. Through this extension, the concept of hedge has overlapped with several other concepts such as modality and evidentiality.
In practice, there are several ways in which speakers can indicate approximation. They may use expressions that are vague in themselves, or they may qualify expressions that would otherwise be more precise, with the use of approximators such as about, around, or like.
Summarizing, we may say that:
far from being a defect vagueness is in fact an essential feature of language and competent users are generally able to use a degree of vagueness which is right for their purpose;
vagueness is not only an inherent feature of natural language but also—and crucially—it is an interactional strategy. Speakers are faced with a number ofcommunicative tasks, and they are vague for strategic reasons. Varying the level ofvagueness may help guide the addressee to make the intended representation ofentities and events and to draw intended implications from them; …