2. Literature Review

2.1 Development of the study on English sports news

Enormous amounts of sports matches are reported every year, however there are few publications analyze the development of sports news reports systematically and specifically. Traditional sports news are the collections of scores number or the records of win or loss, however recent sports news reports have their unique stylistic features gradually become the  

language of journalism. Actually, most research mainly focus on sports news reports broadcasted on the radio, just like Ferguson analyzed the news of American basketball in 1983. In China, professors have intended to expound the stylistic features of news reports, but their studies did not concentrate on sports news. Most recently,only Zhang Jian (1994) and Wu Qianlong (2001) studied several small pieces of sports news respectively. Overall the emphasis of early research was put on the vocabulary or structure of the news reports rather than the use of ambiguity in those news.文献综述

2.2 Development of the study on ambiguity in language

The Chinese and foreign linguists’ research of ambiguity has been developing continuously in the summary. Actually the study of ambiguous language should be traced back to Aristotle period. During that time, a philosopher in Megarian School named Eublides was the first one to pay attention to ambiguous phenomenon and he raised the famous ‘Sorites Paradox’. In the early 1965s, the professor Zadeh of the United States University of California Berkeley have published thesis Fuzzy Sets and put forward fuzzy concept and theory in the Information and Control magazine. Then the first systematic research on ambiguity appeared and the fuzzy set theory is an important basic theory for the study of ambiguity. 

The research of ambiguity in our country started from 1979s and mainly focused on theoretical study. Recently the content, visual angle and theory of the research have been extending and enriching. Chinese scholars like Chen Xinren, Dai Weidong, Yuan Xiaoning and so on have proposed complete construction of ambiguity. English Linguistics: A Practical Coursebook written by Chen Xinren mainly refers to the methods of linguistic research, which can be applied into studying the exact examples of ambiguity in sports news reports. Verschueren came up with the adaption theory in his book Understanding Pragmatics in 1999. This theory is a new pragmatics research and the principle of it concerns on linguistic form and strategy in communication. 

3. Theoretical Foundation of Ambiguity

From the viewpoint of Verschueren, “adaptation is the property of language which enables human beings to make negotiable linguistic choices from a variable rang of  

possibilities in such a way as to approach points of satisfaction for communicative needs.” ( Verschueren, 1991:61). 

3.1 The Adaptation Theory来!自~优尔论-文|网www.youerw.com

As we can see, adaptation is a dynamic process and communicative context and physical surroundings effect the adaptability. Firstly Verschueren thinks that temporal deixis and spatical deixis are connected with the physical world. That is to say, when some activities happened in the physical world, people will make some linguistic choice corresponding to the real time and locations of the events. like the phase “some places”, it is not necessary to mention the exact places, because the it will not affect the readers’ understanding of the news. Secondly, adaptation to the mental world. As Verschueren points out, it is no doubt that verbal interaction is the communication from mind to mind. Here the “mind” refers to “mind in society” ( Verschueren, 2000:87). Thus an expression should also adapt to writers’ or readers’ mental world. The news language could express the writers’ feelings, opinions and attitudes. Such as “so much”, “more chilling”, “could” and so on. At the same time, the choice of words should adapt to readers’ mental world, it should meet the readers’ the demand of entertainment, timeliness and vitality of the information. Thus the sports news reports can attract more potential readers. At last, adaptation to the social world. According a survey, the percentage of ambiguity used to adapt to politeness. Politeness as a communicative principle, plays a important role in the social world. According to Channel (2001), ambiguity can be used to avoid threatening face. For example “disadvantaged students”, which is a term means students get the low grade. It does not say “bad students” and avoids the embarrassment during the social communication.