V

Vagueness ‘Vagueness’ (Kempson 1977) consists of ‘a closed set of identifiable items that can be interpreted based on the particular context in which they occur’ (Cheng 2007: 162). These items signal ‘to the hearer that the utterance, or part of it, is not to be interpreted precisely’ (Cheng 2007: 162). Vagueness is defined variously as ‘fuzziness, vague language, generality, ambiguity and even ambivalence’ (He 2000: 7), vague language (Channell 1994), vague expressions (Carter and McCarthy 1997), imprecision (Crystal and Davy 1975), and loose talk (Sperber and Wilson 1995). Vague expressions are more pervasive in spoken discourse, particularly conversations, than written discourse, occur in a variety of contexts, and serve a variety of functions (Carter and McCarthy 1997; Biber et al. 1999; Jucker et al. 2003), although the use of vagueness varies across spoken genres (Cheng 2007). Cheng and Warren (2001, 2003) find Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English use vagueness to perform similar functions in social interaction, such as to achieve solidarity, cover up linguistic and knowledge deficiencies, show that they know the rules of information quantity in different speech situations, and protect one’s face and that of others. Warren (2007) suggests that discourse intonation (Brazil 1997) can disambiguate vagueness or add extra layers of meaning to vague items based on the speaker’s perceptions of the context. Regarding linguistic realizations of vagueness,

Crystal and Davy (1975: 112-14) identify types of lexical vagueness on a spectrum, from items which express ‘total vagueness’ like thing, whatsit

and so on, to examples such as I’ve got some tomatoes, beans and things, and the use of the suffix-ish in colloquial English. Brown and Yule (1983: 8-9) also note that spoken language contains a lot of ‘general, non-specific’ vocabulary. Dubois (1987: 531) describes the use of hedges such as close to, about, around, on the order of, and something like with numbers as ‘imprecise’ numerical expressions. Wierzbicka (1986a: 597) calls just, at least, only, merely and at the most ‘approximatives’. Channell (1994) describes three categories of vagueness:

(a) vague additives to numbers: a word or phrase is added to a precise figure to signal a vague reading (‘about’, ‘around’, ‘round’, ‘approximately’);

(b) vagueness by choice of vague words or phrases (‘and things’, ‘or something’, ‘and such’, ‘or anything’, ‘thing’, ‘thingy’, ‘whatsisname’, ‘whatnot’);

(c) vagueness by scalar implicature (‘most’, ‘many’, ‘some’, ‘few’, ‘often’, ‘sometimes’, ‘occasionally’, ‘seldom’).