Vague Language Explored

✍ Scribed by Joan Cutting (eds.)

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK
• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 257
• Edition: 1
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

Vague language ('bags of time', 'doing stuff', 'and all that') is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. This book examines its function. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, and suggests applications in TEFL and directions for future research.

✦ Table of Contents

Front Matter....Pages i-xiii
Front Matter....Pages 1-1
Introduction to Vague Language Explored ....Pages 3-17
Front Matter....Pages 19-19
‘This We Have Done’: The Vagueness of Poetry and Public Relations....Pages 21-39
‘About Twelve Thousand or So’: Vagueness in North American and UK Offices....Pages 40-61
Caught Between Professional Requirements and Interpersonal Needs: Vague Language in Healthcare Contexts....Pages 62-78
‘Well Maybe Not Exactly, but It’s Around Fifty Basically?’: Vague Language in Mathematics Classrooms....Pages 79-96
‘I Think He Was Kind of Shouting or Something’: Uses and Abuses of Vagueness in the British Courtroom....Pages 97-114
Front Matter....Pages 115-115
Vague Language as a Means of Self-Protective Avoidance: Tension Management in Conference Talks....Pages 117-137
‘Looking Out for Love and All the Rest of It’: Vague Category Markers as Shared Social Space....Pages 138-157
Front Matter....Pages 159-159
The Use of Vague Language Across Spoken Genres in an Intercultural Hong Kong Corpus....Pages 161-181
{ / [ Oh ] Not a < ^ Lot > }: Discourse Intonation and Vague Language....Pages 182-197
‘Und Tralala’: Vagueness and General Extenders in German and New Zealand English....Pages 198-220
Front Matter....Pages 221-221
‘Doing More Stuff — Where’s It Going?’: Exploring Vague Language Further....Pages 223-243
Back Matter....Pages 245-251

✦ Subjects

Sociolinguistics;Psycholinguistics