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Analysis of vague language in English political discourse
Chapter I  Introduction
1.1Need for the Study
In a long time, people tried to pursue precise expression and avoid vague expression, and they regarded precision as the foundation of expressing language's brilliance vividness and esthetics (Wu, 2003). They seek for expressing themselves as clearly or precisely as possible in communication. Maybe the philosophic foundation of that can be traced back to ancient Greek as Aristotle once said that precision of a language is the basis of fine tradition. Channell has mentioned:
People have many beliefs about language. One important one is that "good" usage involves(among other things ) clarity and precision. Hence, it is believed that vagueness, ambiguity, imprecision, and general woolliness are to be avoided. Thus, Partridge (1947:372)  in  his  Usage  and  Abusage:  The  ideal  at  which  a  writer  should aim,-admittedly it is impossible of attainment,  is that he write so clearly, so precisely, so unambiguously, that his words can bear only one meaning to all averagely intelligent readers that presses an average knowledge of the language used. (2000) However, the language we use everyday is so diversified that there is no clear boundary among the things to be expressed. Both precision and vagueness reside in human language, which are the two inseparable sides of a contradiction. Without either of them, communication will be inadequate. In fact, the rule that people follow while communicating with others is "be precise while preciseness is needed, and be vague while vagueness is required (He, 2006).
Vague language did not draw people's attention until it was introduced into linguistics in the 1960s. Since then, people have come to realize that vagueness is a common phenomenon in human language, which constitutes an inherent property of natural language (Wu, 2003)
Vagueness is universal and widely used in a variety of discourses and many researches on vagueness have been conducted in the fields such as business, advertisement, news, and the like. There are fewer researches, however, on the vagueness in political language. As a matter of fact, being one of the oldest language forms, political language plays  an important role not only in diplomacy and communication among countries, also in social culture and ideology. The specialty and purpose of the political language make it better reflecting the vagueness. And the use of vagueness makes the political language more flexible and easier to achieve the speaker's political purposes. Vagueness can successfully meet the needs of political language.

REFERENCES
Aristotle. (1954). Rhetoric and poetics. New York: The Modern Library.
Arne, Nsess&Ingemund, Gullvag (2006). Vagueness and Ambguity. The Trumpeter,  p56-74.
Brown,P.&S.C. Levison.(1987). Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage.  Cambridge: https://www.51lunwen.org/languagethesis/  Cambridge University Press.
Burns, L.C. (1991). Vagueness Language. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Teaching Press.
Chilton,  P.&Schaffner,  C.  (1997).  Discourse  and  Politics.  London:  Sage Publications Ltd., p206-230.
Crystal,  D.&Davy,  D.  (1975).  Advanced  Conversational  English.  London: Longman.
Fairclough, N. (1992) Discourse and Social Cha本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。