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from vagueness, however, vagueness and fuzziness have been used interchangeably by some researchers. In an effort to distinguish fuzziness from other terms, Crystal defines fuzziness as a term derived from mathematics and used by some linguistic unit or pattern. However, it seems that this definition is too general for these four terms sharing the same characteristic—that is indeterminacy. Zhang Qiao holds that “an expression is fuzzy if it has a characteristic of referential opacity, or has an uncertain extensional denotation”. This definition agrees with our understanding of fuzziness. We take an expression as fuzzy only if it lacks a borderline when its meaning is considered. When it comes to the vagueness, there are also various definitions. Zhang Qiao maintains that an expression is vague if it has more than one possible interpretation. However, his definition itself is rather vague, which may be easily confused with other terms. Comparatively speaking, Kempson’ s explanation is closer to our understanding and better illustrated. She divides vagueness into the following four types:
Referential vagueness, where the meaning of lexical item is it in principle clear enough, but it may be hard to decide whether or not the item can be applied to certain objects;
Indeterminacy of meaning, where the meaning of item itself seems indeterminate;
Lack of specification in the meaning of an item, where the meaning is clear but is only generally specified;
Disjunction in the specification of an item’ s meaning, where the meaning involves an either-or statement with different interpretation possibilities.
Actually, fuzziness differs from vagueness in that it is not simply a list of possible related interpretation derived from a vague expression. A fuzzy expression is defined as an expression which has no clear-cut referential boundary. In contrast to fuzziness, a vague expression is defined as an expression which has more than one interpretation, and the question of whether or not these interpretations have a clear-cut boundary is simply irrelevant. Fuzziness is inherent in the sense that it has no clear-cut referential boundary and is not resolved with resort to context, as opposed to vagueness, which may be contextually eliminated.
1.2.2 Vagueness and Ambiguity
　　　Compared with other terms, ambiguity has a more established definition, though some people often use ambiguous examples to explain vagueness. Ambiguity is an expression with more than one competing but distinct meaning, while for vagueness, distinct meaning cannot be identified. Vagueness is characteristic of a single meaning that has borderline cases. Taking truth conditions as the standard, Kempson regards a sentence as ambiguous if it is true in quite different circumstances, that is to say, a sentence is ambiguous if it is simultaneously true and false, relative to the same state of affairs. Zhang Qiao defines ambiguity as “expression which have more than one semantically unrelated meaning; in other words, an expression is ambiguous if it has several paraphrases which are not paraphrases of each other.” For instance: The shooting of hunters was terrible. Here we can’ t tell whether this means the fact that the hunters were shot was terrible or the way in which the hunters shot was terrible. Thus, this sentence is ambiguous since “the shooting of human” has two paraphrases which are not paraphrases of each other. Therefore, if a phra