Communicating through Vague Language

A Comparative Study of L1 and L2 Speakers

Peyman G.P. Sabet, Grace Q. Zhang

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137486387
• Topic: Filología
• Subtopic: Alemán

This book is a comparative study of vague language based on naturally occurring data of L1 and L2 speakers in academic settings. It explores how L2 learners have diverse and culturally specific needs for vague language compared with L1s, and are generally vaguer.

1

Introduction

Vague language (VL) is an integral part of language and has an essential role in effective communication. In this study, vague language is defined as inexplicit expressions, which are used elastically to enrich communication. Vagueness has been considered a demerit by some, who judge it an undesirable phenomenon and a negative feature of language. For them, meaning is considered the core component of communication, irrespective of the speakers’ intentions and contextual factors (Aristotle 1946; Plato 1914), and any kind of communication breakdown is a failure in the person’s ability to create a connection between the right word and the right meaning (Lakoff & Johnson 1980). Others view vagueness differently, and regard the appropriate use of vague language as part of a speaker’s communicative competence (Channell 1994).

The study of vague language has gained popularity since Channell’s (1994) semantic and pragmatic study. In recent years there has been a paradigm shift from philosophy to linguistics in this field, and consequently vague language use has come to be commonly perceived as an integral component of language. This is obvious in Cutting’s (2007) assertion that ‘VL is a central feature of daily language in use, both spoken and written’ (p. 3). The most recent development is by Zhang (2011), who proposes and develops the important concept of elasticity in vague language, pointing to a new direction in research.

With research interest in vague language on the rise, this feature of natural language has found its way into language teaching. Cutting (2007) states, ‘Since the mid-1990s, a limited number of applied linguistics and methodology books have begun to contain a discussion of possible teaching techniques to raise students’ awareness of VL’ (p. 236). As this makes clear, the quantity of books on the subject is few and the focus restricted to awareness-raising during instruction. This study aims to give depth to the role of vague language in language learning and teaching: the sources from which vague language originates in English language teaching (ELT), how it can be positioned to provide language learners with an extremely effective communication tool, and common functions that language learners use it for in communication. It also sheds light on the appropriate criteria to be used as the basis for consciousness-raising on vague language in ELT.

The scope of vague language is contained in the area of pragmatic competence in language teaching. The small but growing body of literature indicates that instruction on pragmatic competence has proven remarkably effective in language teaching (Liddicoat & Crozet 2001; Niezgoda & Röver 2001; Ohta 2001). The present study adopts a vague language perspective in cross-cultural and interlanguage pragmatics.

The naturally occurring data of this study comprise the classroom interactions of three groups of speakers of English: L1s (American English), Chinese-speaking learners of English (the Chinese) and Persian-speaking learners of English (the Persian speakers). There are approximately 50,000 words from each group, making a total of 150,000 words for the data. The L1 data are selected from transcripts of tutorials and small lectures on social topics from the Michigan Corpus of Academic Spoken English (MICASE). The Chinese data are a transcript of the video-recorded classroom interactions of upper-intermediate to advanced level learners of English in China, and the data for the Persian speakers are similar, but video-recorded in Iran. The data are analyzed on two levels: lexical, to investigate the frequency , position of occurrence, and clusters of five vague items; and functional, to examine the pragmatic properties of vague language.

1.1 Purpose of the study

Attention has been, and is still being, drawn to vague language use in settings such as work-related interactions (Koester 2007), healthcare (Adolphs, Atkins & Harvey 2007), and courtrooms (Cotterill 2007), but suffers a dearth of research in academic contexts. While Ruzaitė (2007) carried out a useful study in educational settings, the scope of her research is limited to quantifiers and approximators. This research is one of the few investigations of vague language in English language learning classes with students from two vastly different socio-cultural and linguistic backgrounds, Chinese and Persian-speaking learners of English, compared with L1s.¹

Learners of English tend to use vague language at higher or lower levels and in different forms from L1s; and the ways in which they mobilize it is also different (Cheng 2007; Cheng & Warren 1999). The central research question of this study is: what are the different levels of frequencies and forms of vague language used between L1 and L2 speakers, the strategic moves, and the contributing cultural and linguistic factors? Four research questions are addressed:

a. How is vague language realized among L1s, the Chinese and the Persian speakers?

b. How frequently is vague language used, and what are the most fluently used lexical items? How does frequency differ among the three groups?

c. How and why is vague language strategically mobilized? What discrepancies are discerned among the three groups?

d. What cultural and linguistic factors underlie interlinguistic and intercultural diversity in vague language use?

The objectives of this study are to explore vague language realization in terms of its diverse forms and frequencies across L1s, Chinese and Persian speakers, in order to analyze its pragmatic functions and the impact of the underpinning cultural and linguistic factors (such as first-language transfer). The findings of this study will have implications for developing an understanding of the effective use of vague language by learners of English.

1.2 Organization

This book consists of seven chapters structured as follows: Chapter 2 provides a theoretical foundation through a review of previous studies in the field. Chapter 3 presents the approach and methodology selected for this study. The results obtained from the three data sets are presented in Chapter 4. Chapter 5 presents a functional analysis of vague language, and a discussion of the results occurs in Chapter 6. Chapter 7 draws the conclusion and considers the implications of the study.

¹ In this study L1 refers to American English speakers, L2 to Chinese and Persian learners of English. The equivalent terms NS (native speaker) and NNS (non-native speaker) are kept if used in the work of other researchers.

2

Theoretical Foundations

Vague language, as an increasingly explored phenomenon in language, is gaining a long overdue position as a device to express imprecision in academic discourse. The nature of academic discourse, contrary to common belief, requires vague expressions, and teachers and students tend to make extensive use of them to allow them to express degrees of certainty about the strength of a statement (see, for example, Ruzaitė 2007).

There is sufficient evidence that imprecision—or vagueness—is an integral part of academic discourse. Should it be omitted, communication would be adversely affected, because ‘Mastery of vague language (both active and passive) is one measure of communicative competence in a foreign or second language, particularly those aspects termed as “strategic competence” and “sociolinguistic competence”’ (Cheng & Warren 2001, p. 98). Tarnyikova declares ‘though relevant arguments are mostly based on the precision of their wording, vague language needs not necessarily be an “enemy” of sound argumentation, since the deliberate refrain from being vague might result in a precise but less polite or impolite interaction’ (2009, p. 129).

Research on vagueness shows that it is a feature of natural language, serving various functions in communication. Channell (1994) believes vague language cannot be assumed to be the exception rather than the rule. Tarnyikova (2009, p. 119) considers vagueness strategies and manifestations of vague language to be ‘partly universal but to a considerable degree language- and culture-specific’. Ruzaitė (2004, p. 220) asserts that ‘vagueness cannot and should not be avoided, since over precision can lead to communicative breakdowns’.

Vague language, in a broad sense, is assumed to be more frequently employed in spoken than written language (Biber, Johansson, Leech, Conrad & Finegan 1999). The reasons that support this claim are that in spoken discourse, interlocutors share contextual clues such as facial expressions, which may not exist in written discourse, and less precision is required in spoken forms than written discourse (Cook 1989). Speakers have access to intonation (Brazil 1997), which can help them clarify what they mean by what they say. None of these reasons for using vague language in speech implies that in written mode it should be ignored or neglected (Hyland 1998). Myers (1996) points out that research into academic discourse demonstrates that writers too use vague language.

Vague language is elastic. Zhang (2011) states that its elasticity allows it to stretch in many directions, as required by the interlocutor for effective communication. The elasticity of vague language is a function of its lack of specific connotation, so that its interpretation relies on context and communicative purpose. This allows language users to make strategic use of vague language to mitigate, emphasize, evade and so on (Zhang 2011).

2.1 Vague language: what is it and why do we need it?

Early work on vague language is associated with Bertrand Russell (1923), who views vagueness from a philosophical point of view and argues that vagueness or precision are nothing beyond representation: ‘Apart from representation, whether cognitive or mechanical, there can be no such thing as vagueness or precision; things are what they are, and there is an end of it. Nothing is more or less what it is, or to a certain extent possessed of the properties which it possesses’ (p. 85). He considers vagueness a concept that may be applied to any kind of representation, such as a photograph: ‘a representation is vague when the relation of the representing system to the represented system is not one–one, but one–many’ (p. 89).

After Russell, Zadeh (1965) addresses the question of whether concepts in natural language are yes-or-no types or more-or-less types, challenging the tenet of classical set theory which assumes that an element either belongs to a set or it does not: for instance, in ‘John is old’, according to classical theory, John is either old or he is not: being old is not a relative concept. This perspective implies a clear-cut boundary that makes concepts distinct in terms of their truthfulness, which is far from reality in practice. Zadeh (1965) developed an alternative known as fuzzy set theory, expressing a view that counts category membership as a matter of degree rather than a clear-cut issue. Instead of being in the set or not, an individual is in the set to a degree. Lakoff (1972, p. 458) supports Zadeh’s theory, as ‘Clearly any attempt to limit truth conditions for natural language sentences to true, false and “nonsense” will distort natural language concepts by portraying them as having sharply defined rather than fuzzily defined boundaries’.

There seems to be a hierarchical ranking to the truthfulness of a proposition. Heider (1973) offers the idea of a distinction existing between the central membership of a category and peripheral members, using birdiness (defined typically as flying creatures with feathers) as an example. A hierarchal order was established:

robins

eagles

chickens, ducks, geese

penguins, pelicans

bats

In this, some kinds of bird are more birdy than other kinds: robins are regarded as typical of birds; eagles are less typical than robins; chickens, ducks and geese less typical than eagles; penguins and pelicans less typical than chickens, ducks and geese, and bats are counted as hardly a bird at all. Such a hierarchy is in line with the ‘prototype theory’ (Rosch 1973). The meaning of a vague term, such as birdiness, could be appropriately represented by a ranking exemplified by a prototype.

Vague language is defined by Carter and McCarthy (2006, p. 928) as ‘words or phrases with very general meanings which deliberately refer to people and things in a non-specific, imprecise way’. Williamson (1994, p. 4869) states that ‘Used as a technical term, “vague” is not pejorative. Indeed, vagueness is a desirable feature of natural languages. Vague words often suffice for the purpose in hand, and too much precision can lead to time wasting and inflexibility’. In the same way, vague language in this study is used without any negative connotation; instead it is considered to be an important part of everyday language.

Various terms similar to vague language have been used in linguistic studies, the most common being indirectness and inexplicitness. These are not the same. Cheng and Warren (2003) propose a classification in an attempt to clarify the confusion caused by similar terms, arguing that ‘indirect language’ involves an inferential process through which meaning is created, while the hearer has access to language and context. This term embodies paradigms such as conversational implicatures (Grice 1975), illocutionary acts (Austin 1962), indirect speech acts (Searle 1968) and pre-sequences (Levinson 1983). Inexplicitness refers to cases such as items of reference, that and it, which cannot stand on their own. They are independent of context, but once used in a specific context they gain a certain meaning: in other words, meaning is created through ‘joint construction’ (Cheng & Warren 2003, p. 397) by the participants in the context in which the words are used. Substitution, deixis, and reference all fall into the category of inexplicitness. Inexplicitness is considered a characteristic of a native speaker’s conversation, ‘the degree to which linguistic behaviour is reliant on context to convey meaning’ (Cheng & Warren 1999, p. 295). It emerges when a speaker chooses to use ellipsis and substitution, deictic conversation and reference, relying on context to convey the intended meaning. Vagueness differs from both indirectness and inexplicitness in that even when used within a specific context, its property of vagueness is retained. Vague language remains vague in context, rather than becoming precise. As a linguistic phenomenon, it is associated with fuzziness, imprecision, and indefiniteness (Ruzaitė 2007; Zhang 1998). Janicki (2002) opts for the phrase ‘incomprehensible language’ as a broad term which embodies vague language, defining it as ‘words, expressions, formulations, idioms, texts, and the like which are easy to misunderstand, which are hard to understand, or not possible to understand at all’ (p. 215), and claims that ‘incomprehensible language’ appears consistently rather than sporadically in conversation. However, this concept is not equivalent to vague language, which does not disrupt ease of communication.

Channell (1994) presents cogent evidence that in order for communication to be effective and successful, speakers need to use vague words and ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Transcription Conventions
• List of Abbreviations
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theoretical Foundations
• 3 Methodology
• 4 Lexical Analysis of Vague Language
• 5 Pragmatic Functions of Vague Language
• 6 General Discussion
• 7 Conclusions and Implications
• Appendix I: Consent Form for the Director and Teachers
• Appendix II: Consent Form for Participants
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index