Vague Language Explored

✍ Scribed by Joan Cutting

• Year: 2007
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 266
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

The ability to use vague language ("bags of time", "doing stuff", "sort of thing", "and all that") is an aspect of communicative competence of considerable social importance. This volume explores the function of vague language in context. It spans genre analysis, critical discourse analysis, psycholinguistics and cross-cultural sociolinguistics, in a variety of world cultures. It suggests applications in TOEFL, asking questions such as "What should learners be taught to understand and use, and why?" and suggesting directions for future research.

✦ Table of Contents

Cover......Page 1
Contents......Page 6
List of Tables......Page 8
List of Figures......Page 9
Acknowledgements......Page 10
Notes on the Contributors......Page 11
Part I: Introduction......Page 16
1 Introduction to Vague Language Explored......Page 18
Part II: Vagueness and Genre......Page 34
2 ‘This We Have Done’: The Vagueness of Poetry and Public Relations......Page 36
3 ‘About Twelve Thousand or So’: Vagueness in North American and UK Offices......Page 55
4 Caught Between Professional Requirements and Interpersonal Needs: Vague Language in Healthcare Contexts......Page 77
5 ‘Well Maybe Not Exactly, but It’s Around Fifty Basically?’: Vague Language in Mathematics Classrooms......Page 94
6 ‘I Think He Was Kind of Shouting or Something’: Uses and Abuses of Vagueness in the British Courtroom......Page 112
Part III: Psychology of Vagueness......Page 130
7 Vague Language as a Means of Self-Protective Avoidance: Tension Management in Conference Talks......Page 132
8 ‘Looking Out for Love and All the Rest of It’: Vague Category Markers as Shared Social Space......Page 153
Part IV: Cross-Cultural Vagueness......Page 174
9 The Use of Vague Language Across Spoken Genres in an Intercultural Hong Kong Corpus......Page 176
10 { / [ Oh ] Not a < ^ Lot > }: Discourse Intonation and Vague Language......Page 197
11 ‘Und Tralala’: Vagueness and General Extenders in German and New Zealand English......Page 213
Part V: Conclusion......Page 236
12 ‘Doing More Stuff – Where’s It Going?’: Exploring Vague Language Further......Page 238
C......Page 260
F......Page 261
L......Page 262
P......Page 263
S......Page 264
W......Page 265
Y......Page 266