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Chapter One Literature Review

1.1 Previous Studies of Vague Language Abroad
Although it is generally accepted that the study of vagueness began with thepublishment of Zadeh’s Fuzzy Set in 1965, philosophers believe that it is Plato who made theproperty of vagueness in language enjoy growing attentions. From the perspective ofphilosophy, Plato pointed out that in addition to truth and falsehood there was a third field,which became fuzzy logic later, making the foundation of vagueness research. In 1923,Russell who is the famed British philosopher wrote Vagueness, in which he got that thevagueness phenomenon is universal in daily language and summarized the relationshipbetween vagueness and accuracy. In 1953, Austrian philosopher Wittgenstein put forward“family resemblance”, which contributed a great deal to the study of vagueness. In 1962,Ullmann displayed his views on vague language as follows: some terms are rather ambiguousand vague because of various causes; some are intrinsic in the nature of language, whileothers need special situations to take effect. (Ullmann, 1962) Not Until the Fussy Sets writtenby Zadeh who is an American professor of the University of California was published in 1965did vague theory attract widely attention in the whole world. From his paper we realized thatnot all objects in the world have clear-cut boundaries, which played an important role infuzzy logic. He defined “fuzzy sets” as a category of objects that have a continuum of gradesof membership. The set has the character of a membership function, and each object in it isassigned to a grade of membership which ranges from zero to one. (Zadeh, 1965: 338)
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1.2 Previous Studies of Vague Language at Home
Vague language has been studied for a long time and researchers abroad have reachedfruitful achievements, but vague language is a relatively new research field in China. The firstscholar studying vague language in china is Wu Tieping who wrote an article entitled ATentative Exploration of Fuzzy Language in 1979. He accepted Zadeh’s views on vaguenessand introduced the fuzzy sets theory to china and also employed this theory to analyzelinguistic vagueness. Since then, he devoted himself to the study of vague language and wrotemore than thirty articles on it, and then published the book Fuzzy Linguistics in 1999.Nevertheless, more related studies on vague language, especially on pragmatic functionsof vague language are badly in need. Another famous Chinese linguist named He Ziran (1985)explored the pragmatic functions of using vague language in communication. Whereafter, HeZiran (2000) viewed vague language as a communicative tool and analyzed pragmaticvagueness from two aspects of language production and language interpretation. Furthermore,Yu Dongming (1997) also studied pragmatic vagueness.Some other scholars also studied vague language from different angles. Zhang Qiao(1998) probed vague language from the semantic perspective, writing the book FuzzySemantics in which the academic trend of vague language abroad is introduced. Based onZadeh’s “grades of membership”, Shi Anshi (1988) presented a conception of degrees ofvagueness and studied semantic vagueness by means of quantitative analysis.
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Chapter Two Theoretical Foundation

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