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A Study on Pragmatic Vagueness in Diplomatic Language and Its Functions
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I. Introduction
Vagueness is a common feature of language. For instance, people usually use such words as “probably”, “a little”, “quite”, “much”, “around”, “roughly speaking”, and so on. All of these words express imprecise meanings. Vague language is so uncertain itself that it is hard to achieve an unanimously agreed definition for it, even though linguists have been making efforts on it in recent years. Koffi Annan, former United Nation Secretary General, once said, “In many parts of the world, HIV/AIDS has now become one of the main obstacles to development. It is further impoverishing some of the world’s poorest nations and standing in the way of their recovery.” Here he used “some of the world’s poorest nations” instead of pointing out directly that which countries were the poorest. Therefore, the listeners may think of some countries according to their own understandings. In this sense, the proposition is vague, which is essential in the process of diplomatic activities.24657
Crystal and Davy called vagueness as imprecision, which is referred to in a very different context. They state that “lack of precision is one of the most important features of the vocabulary of informal conversation”(111). They put forward the view that vagueness is on a scale related to the formality of the occasion. Kempson thinks the scope of vagueness is bigger than fuzziness, and classifies four types of vagueness on Semantics Theory (124). Nowadays, some linguists are keen on distinguishing such obscure notions as vagueness, fuzziness, ambiguity, and even ambivalence. However, as Professor He Ziran states, what’s important is to know how vagueness is expressed by those notions in language use. It is meaningful only when vagueness is analyzed from the perspective of pragmatics, that is, from the perspective of language use and understanding (206).
Pragmatics is a branch of linguistics that is concerned with the use of the language. Levinson listed about ten definitions of the pragmatics:
“Pragmatics is the study of those relations between language and the context that are grammaticalized, or encoded in the structure of a language. Pragmatics is the study of aspects of meaning not captured in a semantic theory”(27).
“Pragmatics is the study of ability of language users to pair sentence with the context in which they would be appropriate.” Joanna Channell states that “the subject matter of pragmatics has been defined as an account of those meaning propositions not accounted for in semantics”(34). The study of vagueness from the perspective of pragmatics is to study vagueness that happens during the whole process of dynamic communications rather than that created by a single aspect. In theoretical pragmatics, there are two theories which are of particular relevance in the description and explanation of vague language use. The first one is Cooperative Principle, promulgated by Grice. The other one is Politeness Principle, raised by N. Leech. These theories belong to the pragmatic principles, which are referred to as a set of rules kept by people to ensure a successful conversation and reach the purpose of communication. This paper takes a pragmatic approach to analyze the phenomenon with the two pragmatic principles, and to explain the rationality and possibility of vagueness appeared in diplomatic language.
Pragmatic vagueness is common in diplomatic activities. In this paper, diplomatic language is confined to political diplomacy only, and is limited to oral and written practice in speeches, addresses, conferences, negotiations, and letters of Chinese and American diplomats or government leaders. Due to the fact that the oral speech a diplomat makes in any public occasion is to represent his country’s attitude and standpoint rather than that of himself, the diplomat has to use some vague terms to protect his country’s interest. The pragmatic function of vagueness in diplomatic language is another topic of this paper, which is supposed to prove that vagueness in diplomatic language is a type of communicative and self-protecting strategies, and is of great importance to the success of diplomatic activities.