英语论文网

摘要：模糊性是人类语言和人类心理的一个重要特征，模糊语言是一种语言概念，同时又是一种语言现象，它反映了客观事物在外延上的一种不确定性。根据新闻报道的特征，新闻报道应遵循三项原则，即：内容准确，语言简洁，句子清晰。在新闻报道中，很多人往往把这种不确定性与新闻的真实性和准确性对立起来。事实上，英语新闻语篇作为一种特殊文体虽有其自身特点，但作为自然语言，无疑要遵循自然语言的规律，不会与其相悖的。本文主要运用定性和描述分析的方法，借助批判性语篇分析对新闻报道中模糊语言的语用功能进行分析和研究。通过分析收集到的一些众所周知的官方报纸和新闻网站上的英语新闻报道，来说明模糊语言在英语新闻中的必要性和重要性，并阐述模糊语言在理论框架中所体现的语用功能，只有使用得恰当，准确，才有助于提高新闻报道的质量。

Abstract: Vagueness is an essential feature of human language, and it is also an important characteristic of human Psychology. As a linguistic concept together with a linguistic phenomenon, vague language embodies the uncertainty of the language at its extension, News is generally believed to be accurate, brief and clear, however, such uncertainty is often set against the authenticity and accuracy of the news. In fact, in spite of this particular feature, news reports are found to possess the nature of being vague as well, which seems to show that news reports are not exceptions of natural language. Applying descriptive and qualitative methods, the thesis being studied probes into the functions of vague language in news report on the basis of the theoretical framework of Fairclough’ s Critical Discourse Analysis, The analysis is conducted by a number of news materials selected from the official and well-known newspaper and news websites, seeking to demonstrate the necessity and importance of vague language in English news and its pragmatic functions within the theoretical framework. The aim of this paper is to illustrate that the usage of vague language in news is unavoidable and its appropriate and accurate use can help to improve the quality of news reporting.

关键词：模糊语言；功能；新闻报道。

Key words: vague language; functions; news reporting

　
Introduction 引言

　　　Vagueness and precision are the two basic elements in language. However, many people attach much importance to precision, while ignoring the vagueness for a long time, for they believed that vagueness and imprecision are to be avoided in human language. It did not arouse much interest until the beginning of 20th century. The famous English scholar B. Russell pointed out the vagueness phenomenon in a paper entitled Vagueness, indicating that language is more or less vague. Later, it was the American well-known mathematician L.A.Zadeh, a professor of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Electronics Research Laboratory, University of California, who published the paper “Fuzzy sets” in 1965 on Information and Control that laid the fundamental ground of the fuzziness study. From then on, people began to lay much emphasis on the fuzziness study and therefore fuzzy linguistics develops very rapidly. It combines with many other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, psychology, logic, etc, thus resulting in a number of new subjects about fuzziness.
　　　It appears to have two contradictory views about vagueness: one holds that language is a bad thing due to the possibility of leading to misunderstanding; the other holds that it is a good thing because of its flexibility brought to communication. We agree with Channell that “Vagueness in language is neither all ‘bad’ nor all ‘good’. What matter is that vague language is used appropriately.” ( Channel, 2000:3)
　　　In fact, vagueness has become an interesting