ABSTRACT
Chapter 3 puts forward the research questions and presents the aims and significance of this study. There is a great deal of originality in the chapter, especially when the author expatiates at length on traditional Chinese thinking (by Qian Zhongshu and others) that is relevant to the subject of fuzziness. This chapter is probably the most adventurous part of the monograph, and many of the provocative ideas presented in it can be explored further in future work. It takes fuzzy logic and fuzzy linguistics as its theoretical frame. It argues that fuzzy logic and fuzzy linguistics, which derive from multi-valued, rather than binary, logic, have convincing explanatory power for the fuzzy nature of language and translation. In this light, it maintains that no utterances are precise but they have fuzzy boundaries in meaning; that is to say: precision in language is relative and conditional while fuzziness an absolute and universal predicate. In its actual application of such a theoretical frame, the monograph performs two main tasks.
