Филологические
науки/ 7.Язык, речь, речевая коммуникация
к.ф.н. Мартынова И.А.
Самарский государственный экономический университет
Vagueness: an inherent language property
One of the most significant current discussions in
linguistics is devoted to vagueness as it is an increasingly important property
of any contemporary language. Many linguists and psychologists have noted that
in “the modern linguistic consciousness there is a very intensive growth of
vague forms and expressions” (Elistratov, 2002).This paper will review the
research on vagueness conducted within the scope of both western and domestic
schools of thought. Therefore there are two primary aims of this study: 1. To
develop a better understanding of the concept of vagueness from different
perpectives.2. To comprehend and classify various theories of language
vagueness.
In the traditions of the
Anglo-American linguistic school of thought the study of "uncertainty,
vagueness" has a rather long history. As a rule, researchers connect the
origin of the concept under study with the name of the Greek philosopher
Eubulides (4th century BC), who invented the paradoxes related to the vagueness
of language. Charles Peirce, the American philosopher, logician, mathematician,
the father of pragmatism and the founder of semiotics, considered the notion of
vagueness in his works (Peirce, 1996).
Reflections on this subject are shown in the works of the British
philosopher B. Russel (Russel, http://vserver1.cscs.lsa.umich.edu/). "Vagueness" is called
"imprecision" or "inexactness" in the works of the Austrian
philosopher L. Wittgenstein. According to Wittgenstein, the presence of vague
or inexact concepts in our language is caused by the objective reasons and
testifies not to language weakness, but to its flexibility and hidden power
(The Encyclopedic Dictionary, 2004). The
work of the American logician and philosopher Max Black is devoted to
philosophical understanding of the phenomenon (Black, 1937).
In the 60's, 70's and 80's
of the XX century the concepts "vagueness" and
"implicitness" became closely intertwined. J.L. Austin suggested that
vagueness arises as perlocution and results from the lack of accuracy in the
information (Austin, 1962).
Sociologists, although not going deep into the linguistic details, call
“vagueness” one of the main properties of natural language (E. Hoffman 1963, G.
Garfinkel 1967, B. Bernstein 1971) (cited in Plakhov, 2000). G.P. Grice
considers the concept of "implicitness" as the implicature of speech
communication (Grice, 1985). In her work R. Lakoff conveys the concept of
vagueness by the term "imprecision" and interprets in opposition to
the concept of "precision" (Lakoff, 1973). In 1965-1973, American
cybernetics L. Zadeh described the basics of "fuzzy" logic - a
science that some consider as the key to computers of the future, and others as
speculation (Zolotaryov, Masalovich, http://emag.iis.ru/arc/infosoc/emag.nsf/BPA/).
Based on Zadeh's theory, the
American linguist J. Lakoff created his works on fuzzy concepts (fuzzy sets),
within the framework of language categorization (Lakoff, 1973). Lakoff emphasizes that for him the greatest
interest is the question of studying words, whose meaning is implicit and
covered by a veil of "fuzziness ".
The dichotomy of the
concepts "literalness - looseness" is described in the work of the
British linguists D. Sperber and D. Wilson, the authors of relevance theory.
Vagueness is determined from the point of view of formal and logical similarity
between the proposition of the utterance and the proposition of the speaker's
intent. Depending on the degree of matching those propositions, the utterance
can be "uncertain" or “vague” to a greater or less degree
"(Sperber, Wilson, 1991).
The notion of
"ambiguity" is found in the studies of the American linguists N.
Chomsky and JK Zipf. N. Chomsky connects the existence of this concept with a
limited ability to use the resources of the language (Chomsky, 1987). Anyone, who demands all words to be extremely
accurate, incurs the chance of remaining without language at all. Zipf views
"ambiguity" as a result of the conflict of energies spent in the
communication process. The speaker needs to express as much as possible in the
simplest way possible, and the listener needs to get a full understanding of
what has been said. This conclusion is confirmed by a series of experiments
that has been conducted by the American psychologists. The authors of the study
note that it is "cognitively cheaper" to identify meaning out of
context than to use long and complex constructions (Piantadosi et al., 2012).
There is also a concept of
"approximation" (Prince et al, 1982), which is seen as sub concept of
“vagueness” by some modern linguists. The need for an approximate description
arises if the selected language unit cannot adequately verbalize the evaluated
object, i.e. the meaning that is assigned to this unit is only similar, but not
identical, to the meaning that the speaker wants to convey. The main
characteristic of approximation is the blurring of the meaning.
Another concept, inter alia, synonymous to vagueness,
namely "indirectness", can be found in the works of E. Hinkel and J.
Channel (Hinkel, 1997; Channell, 1994).
Thus, Western linguistics
clearly traces the tendency to consider "uncertainty, ambiguity,
inaccuracy, vagueness, fuzziness" as a property inherent in natural
language in general.
Much attention has been paid
to the study of language vagueness in Russian linguistics as well. The
Linguistic Encyclopedic Dictionary defines this category as a semantic property
of the utterance. Researchers in different fields of linguistics study this
category from different perspectives and consider it as: grammatical; Textual
(contextual); Conceptual; Hidden; Latent semantic; Semantic;
Communicatively-evaluative; Category of point of view and functional-semantic
category.
There are many valuable
ideas in the early works of Russian linguists, but their detailed consideration
has already been carried out in the works of modern authors.
The results of the previous
studies are summarized in the papers of M.V. Mashtakova (Mashtakova, 2005),
E.A. Shirokikh (Shirokikh, 2003), I.A. Martynova (Martynova, 2016). A thorough
analysis of vagueness can be found in the monograph by S.V. Adamovich
(Adamovich, 2011) and in theses of Bondareva T.E. (Bondareva, 2011) and
Maryukhin A.P.(Maryukhin, 2010 ).
Universally there have been
many quite successful attempts to separate all the terms mentioned above. For
example E. Bocharova states that although “vagueness”, “approximation” and
“ambiguity” convey inaccurate and unclear meaning, they do it differently. Also
she claims that the problem of “vagueness” is in the degree of veiling of the
meaning (Bocharova, 2011). “Ambiguity” is seen as a question of choice between
two accompanying meanings (Scott, 1987). Or as Zhang Q argues in his paper:
"Fuzziness differs from generality, vagueness, and ambiguity in that it
is not simply a result of a one-to-many relationship between a particular sense
and its specifications; Nor a list of possible related interpretations derived
from a vague expression; Nor a list of unrelated meanings denoted by an
ambiguous expression. Fuzziness is inherent in the sense that it has no
clear-cut referential boundary, and is not resolvable with resort to context,
as opposed to generality, vagueness, and ambiguity, which may be contextually
eliminated "( Zhang Q, 1998, p.).
However, it is recognized by
the majority of researchers that all that concepts under study have the same
main component in their meaning. In her
paper "On Vagueness in authentic English conversation" L. Urbanova
defines this component as "semantic indeterminacy"(Urbanova, 1999).
Researchers have been trying
to define "vagueness" through the concepts of "accuracy",
"clarity", or "certainty". According to the entry on
semantics from the electronic encyclopedia "Krugosvet": "The
most annoying problems for semantics are created by such a complicating factor
as vagueness». “Vague" is the opposite of "exact". Vague words
are inaccurate in relation to the world, which they are called to describe
"(http://krugosvet.ru/enc/gumanitarnye_nauki/
lingvistika/SEMANTIKA).
The relationship between
uncertainty and certainty is emphasized. In logic and philosophy vagueness is
seen as a certainty in its development. According to Sinelnikova,
"The cognitive properties of uncertainty are associated with the
emergence of a special type of motivation - the desire to understand what has
been said, to understand the state of things. The phenomenon of overcoming the
state of dissatisfaction and anxiety provokes the cognitive activity in the
speakers: the unknown or misunderstood attracts, intrigues, stimulates physical
and mental actions to fill in the lacuna. That makes it possible to regard
uncertainty as more powerful than certainty epistemologically "(Sinelnikova, 2011 p.57).
However, as A.A. Fedorov
notes,
"In the first approximation, uncertainty can be defined through its
opposite. Certainty implies something fixed and permanent. People in a state of
certainty are free from doubt, they are sure of what they know. To accept
uncertainty means to accept doubt. But the distinction between certainty and
uncertainty cannot be postulated as a kind of dichotomy, because there are
different degrees of uncertainty " (Fedorov, 2006, p.95).
In the 1970s R.
Norton conducted a content analysis of articles in the journal Psychological
Abstracts from 1933 to 1970 and found that psychologists study eight different
categories, defined as unclear. In our case it was possible to identify 11
categories related to the manifestation of uncertainty in the language.
Therefore, it hardly makes sense to dispute the terms, because as Norton notes,
"The essence of each category penetrates deeply into the essence of all
other categories" (Norton, 1975, p.607).
The variety of approaches to
the study of this phenomenon confirms its complexity. And that is a direct proof
of the epistemological status of vagueness.
In her paper T. E. Bondareva states that "the absence of this
category would be tantamount to the inability of people to establish links
between perceived statements and the reality reflection that they have in their
minds, i.e. inability to understand the meaning of these statements "
(Bondareva,2011, 78).
N.R. Kirichenko highlights
the multiple dimensions of vagueness and argues that "Vagueness is one of
the core principles of human logic”. The author then explains that “To define
something is to define a range of meanings that are assigned to it and cannot
be changed in the future. In their interpretations people prefer not to rely on
something unchangeable, independent of them. The simplest way to avoid that to
re-formulate the messages every time, as the current situation demands "
(Kirichenko, 2008, p. 15). In other words, when considering the manifestations
of vagueness in language and speech, it is necessary to keep in mind the
predominant importance of the context.
S. Pinker explains the
causes for language vagueness: "Any specific thought in our head contains
a huge amount of information. But when it comes to conveying a thought to
someone else, the amount of attention is negligible, and the language is slow.
To convey information to the listener for a reasonable period of time, the
speaker can pack only a part of his message into words, expecting that the
listener will fill in the blanks himself "(Pinker, 1994).
Fortunately, our desire to
understand speech is so strong that it is able to ignore the vagueness of
pronunciation, deviations from the grammatical norm, inaccurate and even
incorrect word usage. As E.Barber and E.Peters explain, "what people are
good at is the jumping from the initial facts to the final conclusions: we need
two or three pieces of information to build on their basis a model or a rule
..." (cited in Burlak, 2011). Strictly speaking, vagueness, uncertainty,
indirectness, or ambiguity can be considered as a positive feature of language,
contributing to successful effective communication (for more details, see Juba
et al, 2003; Piantadosi et al., 2003; Mishra et al., 2011).
In her article A.A.
Melnikova argues that "the vagueness of the utterance can form the
dominance of this concept in our perception of the world. As a result,
subconsciously we feel that our world is a mass without a definite
comprehensive structure." (Melnikova, 2003, p.139).Solid evidence for this
assumption can be found in the recent results of the studies in the field of
cognitive psychology. With their experiments the American researchers proved
that the language significantly affects the picture of the human world, it
determines the basic fundamental foundations of human knowledge (see
Boroditsky, 2011).
Thus, summing up our
analysis it is now possible to state that we observe a paradox in vagueness
research. On the one hand, there is a great interest in the problem and a large
number of studies have been conducted. The forms in which vagueness is
manifested and realized are very diverse. On the other hand, the lack of the
metalanguage (that could allow discussion of vagueness phenomenon) and a single
"science-like" term (that could define the concept itself) is clearly
evident. Obviously, despite quite a long history of study, this field of
research remains poorly understood and the general principles of approach to it
are only beginning to be seen, and the efforts of scientists to synchronize.
Based on the premise that
language is the most accessible part of consciousness (Pinker, 1994), it seems
obvious that the study of vagueness as a general property of any natural
language and detailed description of its manifestations at the level of speech
could lead us to a better understanding of human nature. Also, based on the
data of the research conducted in this direction, it would be possible to trace
the thinking conventions of this or that nation and to some extent reconstruct
a national cognitive perception of the world in a certain period of time.
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