VAGUE LANGUAGE AS POLITENESS-SCALE LEVELER IN OPRAH WINFREY’S SHOWS

The paper explores some pragmatic functions of vague markers from the perspective of politeness in formal and informal settings. The pragmatic value of vague markers lies in the capacity of making utterances more tentative and acceptable within the bounds of social and cultural norms and behavior. Vagueness serves as an effective tool to show lack of exactness and accuracy for the sake of politeness the appropriate level of which can only be determined in a specific situational context. Mastery of this language shows one’s level of communicative competence which, in its turn, considerably contributes to the improvement of sociolinguistic competence, both being equally important in presenting the propositional content into a coherent whole. The aim of the current research is to demonstrate the pragmatic significance of linguistic and extralinguistic means of expressing vagueness and to study its communicative value and various manifestations through revealing the most striking features. The research lies in addressing the question of correlation between the pragmatic interpretation and semantic representation of vagueness in spoken communication from the politeness perspective. Vague language is viewed from a completely new angle in directive speech acts. Thanks to this approach, vagueness is analysed in light of form-meaning-use correlation act as a politeness-scale leveler, thereby allowing to draw a clear-cut demarcation line between its pragmatic interpretations in terms of the appropriateness, tentativeness and acceptability of polite behaviour in different situational contexts. Incorporating sufficient evidence from various reviews and TV Shows, this study is an attempt to demonstrate contextually-driven fluctuations in the illocutionary force of vague markers which may lead to different pragmatic interpretations due to both linguistic and extralinguistic factors. Full text …

Leave a Reply