ON THE CATEGORY OF VAGUENESS IN SPOKEN ENGLISH

Abstract

Vagueness is a widespread phenomenon that sometimes passes unnoticed by the speakers unless there is a deliberate need to be vague. Vague language includes words or phrases that have general meanings and in an imprecise way or deliberately refer to people and things. Vague expressions are discourse markers that add pragmatic tone to an utterance: they are multifunctional in nature and play a vital role in decoding the pragmatic meaning of an utterance. The aim of this article is to show the structural and semantic peculiarities of vague expressions and the intention of being vague in interaction. The research is based on corpus findings, namely BYU-BNC (British National Corpus), COCA (Corpus of Contemporary American English), GloWbE (Global Web-Based English) and on TalkBank the role of which is to foster fundamental research of human and animal communication.