1 What is vague language? 1.1 Introduction Language is deceptive; and though English is subtle it also allows a clever person—one alert to the ambiguities of English—to play tricks with mock precision and to combine vagueness with ‘politeness. English is perfect for diplomats and lovers. (Paul Theroux, The London Embassy) Some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. (Lakoff 1972: 195) People have many beliefs about languages One important one is that Reel eons ater things) ‘elaxioyvand ypreeision lence, it is believed that vagueness, ambiguity, imprecision, and general woolliness are to be avoided. Thus, Partridge in his Usage and Abusage: The ideal at which a writer should aim,—admittedly it is imposs- ible of attainment,—is that he write so clearly, so precisely, so unambiguously, that his words can bear only one meaning to all averagely intelligent readers that possess an average knowledge of the language used. (1947: 372) I would like to begin by showing that this is rather too simple a view, and likely to be positively misleading as an instruction to those learning how to write—especially second language users of English. I will do this by giving some examples of texts which most people would think of as being Sgeesidemguagenuseywand concerned with Serious topics. We shall see that eheymconpainsa:good».deal..of- . ¢ expressions picked out in italics are some of those I would identify as vague:(1) September 15th. This archipel ¢ Vague Language ago consists of ten principal islands, of which five exceed the others in size. They are situated under the Equator, between five and six hundred miles westward of the coast of America. They are all formed of volcanic rock; a few fragments of granite curiously glazed and altered by the heat, can hardly be considered as an exception. Some of the craters, surmounting the large islands, are of immense size, and they rise to a height between three and four thousand feet. Their flanks are studded by innumerable small orifices. I scarcely hesit- ate to affirm that there must be in the whole archipelago at least two thousand craters, 2) ‘Olive will come down in about.ten minutes; she told me to tell you that, About ten; that is exactly like Olive. Neither five nor fifteen, and yet not ten exactly, but either nine or eleven. She didn’t tell me to sf she was glad to see you, because she doesn’t know whether she is:or not, and:she wouldn’t for the world expose herself to telling a fib. These words were spoken with much volubility by a fair, plump, smiling woman who entered a narrow drawing-room in which a visitor, kept waiting for a few moments, was already absorbed in a book. (3) The corresponding two break version of Chow’s test yields an F value of 2.24 with (6,61) degrees of freedom and since the relevant 5 percent'critical value is 2.25 we are led to reject the null hypothesis of structural homogeneity across G’s 70 country sample in favour of the alternative hypothesis that a pair of structural breaks occurred at observations 24 and 52 at a signi- ficance level fractionally in excess of 5 percent. ‘Tibetan Chomolungma, peak on the crest of yan ri rige in Asia, the highest'point on Earth, on the undemarcated Nepal~Tibet (China) border, in the approximate position of 28 deg\N, 87 deg E, Three barren ridges the South- east, Northeast and: West culminate in two summits at 29,028 ft (8,848 m; Everest) and 28,700. ft (8,748 m; South Peak). The mountain can be seen directly from its northeastern side where it rises about 12,000 ft above the Tibetan Plateau, (, . .) Contro- versy over the exact altitude of the summit developed because of variations due to snow level, gravity deviation, and light 2 ov aepsonafame What is vague language? ion. The figure currently accepted—29,028 ft (plus or Re pacilon) Svrad established by the Survey of India between 1952 and 1955. For sources, see Note at the end of this chapter. ‘The most obvious vague expressions are italicizad. Now that I have drawn your attention to them, you will see that there is plenty of vagueness in these examples. However, I have hot presented them because I want to show that these writers are ‘bad’ writers. Quite the reverse: I want to say that these are competent writers. It is cing. speakers and language to make it suitable to the situation (when, where, and why?) and the linguistic context (is it a gossipy |chat, an interview, a story in a popular newspaper?). A major dimension of variation is between the spoken and the written language| as can be seen by comparing the written texts (1)-(4) above with the following extract from a conversation: [P and Q talk about their hopes for their small daughter] Q: As far as career and things like that, 1 mean it’s much too early, when I left school I thought I was gaing to.do one thing and I've ended up doing dozens of othes things, so I think that anything I decided she wouldn't do it anyway P {I'd like her to have the opportun- ity, I'd like her to have opportunities to db... : [I'd like her to experience some of the things we've done, we've been lucky, well|I think we've been lucky, we've, enjoyed a... lot of outdoors activities P: We're encouraging her a lot ~~~~~ we do go to Wales a Jot, when we've ~~~~~ Q: Before ~~~~Vague Language ‘ P: [We take, she likes to walk, and we sort of, we're looking forward to the da y when buy hi i ras we can buy her her first walking Q: We've done mountain walking, we've walked the Cornish coast, we’ve ~~~~~~ P: [Not with Lucy | Q: No, no P: Before we had Lucy Q: We've walked the, part of the Pembrokeshire coast, we didn’t do it all but a good bit of it [A] | Overlaps, interruptions, false starts, and grammatically incomplete . |sections show the characteristics of unstructured conversation. | Again, the more obvious vague expressions are in italics. One way \in which both speakers and writers tailor their language is by varying \the precision and vagueness, and it is this type of variation which is \the central interest of this book. Vague expressions occur in both spoken and written English, and data from both will be examined. Most speakers of English are not particularly aware of the fre- quency of vague language use (until it is pointed out to them) and this fact is in itself of interest, It shows that i i “Someone seems to be deliberately withholding information. This makes vagueness like many other linguistic phenomena, which pass \ unnoticed until an investigating linguist argues that they are worthy | of description. An example is metaphor, which appeared to be an esoteric side issue until the publication of Metaphors We Live By | (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In that book, the authors make the point that speakers very often do not even realize that language they are using is metaphorical. A similar observation holds for vague lan- . guage, in that speakers often do not realize that the language they are using is vague. In this book, then, 1 set out to describe the appropriate use of vague language, and in so doing to work towards answers to the following questions: Which words and expressions count as vague language in English? How do they enable speakers or writers to be vague? 4t f i What is vague language? How do hearers and readers understand and decode vague language? Why and when and where is vague language used? Luse the ternl‘work towards’ answers,\rather than provide answe because, as is often the case in the description of language, the tasl emerged as larger than first envisaged, and larger in several ways, Firstly, the more I worked on vague language the more I realized that there is ‘a lot of it about’ in terms of occurrences in texts, Secondly, the list of types of expressions and words which appeared to be able’ to be used vaguely grew ever longer. What had at first appeared to be material for a slim monograph grew ‘into something potentially too long for a volume in this series. Thirdly, the complex- ity of analysis required became greater and greater. It is much more than just a question of listing vague expressions, giving their mean- ings, and saying when they are used, Hence, in order to produce this book, there have been many compromises. Much has been left out, or covered more sketchily than I would have liked. Related work has been referred to without description, leaving readers to follow it up for themselves, Throughout the book, therefore, and especially in the concluding chapter, I give signposts to fruitful directions for further work, and hope thereby to inspire others’ interest and lay the groundwork for future developments. 1.2 Defining vague language In this chapter, I introduce the general notion of vague language by outlining some previous approaches to it. Interest in vagueness in language use and meaning has arisen in a number of disciplines: literary criticism, linguistics, psychology, philosophy. Much of it suggests that vagueness is present in.a great deal of language use, and that therefore a complete theory of Janguage must have vagueness as an “There appear to im been twexonteadiatary.points-of view: one, that vagueness in language is a Gadijithings the other, that it is a Sige Oe nn (1962) in a section entitled ‘Words with blurred iges’, traced from Plato to Byron a recurrent feeling of the inad- equacy of language to express thought, particularly because of its lack of precision. He noted also the converse feeling among poets 5Vague Language and creative writers, that such vagueness is in fact an_advantage. This idea has also been reflected by Wittgenstein (1953) who suggests that words are like blurred photographs and adds, ‘Is it even always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a'sharp one? Isn’t indistinct one often exactly what we need?” - (Ullmann\goes on to point out another important aspect of vagueness. He notes that: If one looks more closely at this vagueness one soon discovers that the term is itself rather vague and ambiguous: the condition it refers to is not a uniform feature but-has- many aspects and may © result from a variety of causes. Some of these are-inherent in the very nature of language, whereas others come into’ play only in special circumstances. (1962: 118) ‘Heynterihuressvaguenessiroefqumfanranny a. generic character of words; 2 b, meaning is never homogeneous (i.e. it is context-bound); c. lack of clear-cut boundaries in the non-linguistic-world; ¢ d, lack of familiarity with what-the words stand for. Let us consider his four factors in turn. About reason a. he says that what words refer to are ‘not siigle items but classes of things or events bound together by some common element’ (ibid.: 118). For example, there is a class of things referred to in English by the term bird, but if we look at it in more detail, we see that some birds are very typically birdy’ (robin), while other birds (ostrich, penguin) do not feel like typical birds and lack some of the central ‘characteristics of ‘birdiness’ (flying, perching in trees). This inevitably leads to vagueness which is “in some ways regrettable, but it is the price we have to pay for having a means of social. communication flexible enough to co, Pre the infinite variety of our experiences’, (For a similar view iter a anguage were not vague, it would not permit adequate commun- mn, see Daitz 1956.) Reason b.—interpretation of meaning i eoateee pone Indisputably so, but Ullmann's implication is that wil i it i “Only evan ha sfc interpretation to be put-on any word: his development, wine ate pi aspect ofa person, which phase in 124). Thatis, he hotie ary ls activities we have.inimind’ (1962: I shall » that eect ultimately there are exact interpretations, uggest exist at least some expressions which are 6i f 5 f b t What is vague language? vague and for which a precise interpretation or analysis is ey ible, Reason c.—the non-linguistic world is vague. Indeed, in any case as far as our subjective perception of it goes. A standard example here would be to ask oneself when a hill becomes large enough to qualify as a mountain, or at what precise age a girl starts to be correctly referred to as a woman. Reason d.—unfamiliarity. Definitely, a8 we shall see from analysing some samples of conversa- tions where people seem to be not quite sure of what they are talking about. Ullmann’s points are fair, but I think he confuses causes and effects. That is to say, c, and d, are facts about thelworld and people in it, which in turn are reflected:by, even necessitate, the capacity of language to express vagueness, that is a. and b., among other factors. So, linguistic vagueness is not gratuitous—it is caused (like many other observed characteristics of language) by the world (in the moat (in the most general sense) in which language is used, Peirce (1902) is often considered as the originator of the notion of vagueness in language, although, as we have seen, Ullmann dates it rather earlier. Peirce was perhaps the first to try to formulate the notion in a rigorous way, as follows: ¥ A proposition is vague where there are possible states of things concerning which it is intrinsically uncertain whether, had they been contemplated by the speaker, he would have regarded them as excluded or allowed by the proposition. By iteinsically uncer- tain we mean not uncertain in consequence of/any ignorance of the interpreter, but because the speaker's habits of language were indeterminate; 80 that one day he would regard the proposition as excluding, another as admitting, those states of things. Yet this must be understood to have reference to what might be deduced from a perfect knowledge of his state of mind; for it is precisely because these questions never did, or did not frequently, present themselves that his habit remained. indeterminate. (1902: 748) That is to say, the language system permits speakers to produce utterances without having decided whether certain facts are ‘excluded or allowed by’ them. Another approach to. is found in the more psychologic- ally-oriented work af Decse (1 ‘He holds that vagueness of com- munication it it thedangungeryerent::*Vague Language \ I have been arguing for some years now (...) that the correspondence between the ideas possessed by two individuals who are in communication on a common topic is rather poor, a condition which we ordinarily do not notice because we seldom make explicit attempts to validate a communicated ide: inst the original, When we do, as in the case of giving directions to someone about how to do something, we are suddenly made aware of the discrepancy that exists between ‘the same’ idea in the minds of two different people. Ordinary situations demand that we place only the loosest of interpretations upon some lin- Buistic utterance we hear. (1974: 72) et hh REE It is obviously dithcult to separate out language from the ideas it expresses, but it seems to me that claiming that it is our ideas which are vague, rather than our language, is another way of attempting to make the analysis of language less complicated, by shifting the problem away from linguistics and into psychology. The idea that the structure of ideas is vague in no way precludes the language system also incorporating vagueness, but in a sense, discussing the structure of ideas goes beyond the proper province of this book, which is to explain how it is that vagueness is part of language. Vagueness, or as they call it, imprecision, is referred t different context by Crystal and Davy (1975), in an applied linguistics textbook which accompanied a series of recordings of natural con- versations. Analysing conversational English from the point of view of helping the foreign learner, they state that ‘lack of precision is one of the most important features of the vocabulary of informal ° conversation’ (ibid.: 111). They put forward the view that vagueness is on a scale related to the formality of the occasion, and that speakers can, if they choose, be more precise, They give four reasons for vagueness: (a) memory loss—the speaker forgets the correct word; (b) the language has no suitable exact word, or the speaker does not know it; (c) the subject of the conversation is not such that it requires precision, and an approximation or ‘characterization will do; and, (d) the choice of a vague item is deliberate to maintain the atmosphere. (We shall see examples of all these in Chapter 8.) Crystal and Davy note that speakers in their extracts mark vagueness by useWhat is vague language? of certain expressions. Among those cited are: something like that, or something, somewhere, probably, and in a way. A piece of work which sets out to describe one of these, or something, is Ball and Ariel (1978). They describe their study as ‘sketchy and lopsided’, suggesting in their conclusions several further questions and saying ‘such questions call for further research’, This book takes up the questions they raise and takes them further in the detailed exposition of or something and related tags in Chapter 6. Crystal and Davy usefully draw attention to the existence, in. spoken English, of three types of device for expressing vagueness: firstly, a set of nouns ‘which express total vagueness’, such as thing- ummy, thingy, thingammajig, whatsit. They note that ‘their spelling is somewhat uncertain, since they are features of the spoken language only’ (Crystal and Davy 1975: 112). In the same way, Sankoff, Thibault, and Berubé (1978) note chose, affaire, de quoi, histoire, patente, machin, and truc for Montreal French, Probably all lan- guages have dummy nouns of this sort. Those occurring in English are described in Chapter 7. Secondly, Crystal and Davy note a number of generic terms and collective nouns, such as oodles, bags of, heaps of, umpteen, and a touch of. These are the subject of Chapter 5. Thirdly, they mention ways of expressing number approximations: a class of thirty odd, there were aboutlaround thirty, there were getting on for thirty. These are analysed in Chapter 3. They note also the existence of prefixes and suffixes which ‘are frequently used to express approxi- mation, when precision is not of primary concern’ (1975: 116), giving as examples: That mountain is rather table-like Linguisticswise she’s rather clever They conclude, ‘Native speakers manipulate their language in this way all the time in informal speech’, Their ‘reasons’ for vagueness mentioned informally begin to sound like informa! statements of pragmatic rules relevant to vagueness. The existence of the words and expressions they note, and their prevalence in their recordings, lend support to the contention that vagueness is both intrinsic, and important, in the language system of English. An applied linguistic study which undertook a corpus-based study 9Vague Language of vagueness can be found in Kennedy (1987). He attempts to quantify the frequency of the approximation devices he looked at (although he points out that his findings are not likely to be very accurate because his corpus was not large (63,176 running words of printed texts). His overall finding was that his corpus contained 1,407 different vague expressions of quantification, and that there were 9,135 occurrences. This meant 14.46 per cent of the words in the corpus, or one word in every seven. Some of these would not count as vague in my classification, but nevertheless Kennedy’s work indicates that approximation overall is frequent and ‘thus deserving of more analysis than it has so far received. The attention of linguistic semanticists has been drawn to vague language because of the problems its existence appears to pose for semantic models of meaning. Truth-conditional semantics, which aims to describe the meaning of senterices in terms of the conditions which must pertain for them to be ‘true’, classically operates with three truth values: true, false, and lacking a truth value (sentences which lack a truth value are such things as orders—Pick that book up! or questions— Would you like to go to the cinema?). The Amer- ican linguist Lakoff (1972) attacked’ the tripartite division of sen- tences into true, false, and lacking a truth value: Clearly any attempt to limit truth conditions for natural languages to true, false and ‘nonsense’ will-distort:the-natural language con- cepts by portraying them as having:sharply defined rather than fuzzily defined boundaries. (1972: 183) He drew evidence to support this view of language from the work on category membership of Rosch (1973). She reported experiments which showed that perceptual categories-such.as colour and shape have internal structure. By internal structure the following is meant: categories are composed of a ‘core meaning’ which consists of the ‘clearest cases’ (best examples) of the category, ‘surrounded’ by other category members of decreasing similarity to that core meaning’ (ibid.: 112), She then extended this to see if psychological categories not showing obvious perceptual scaling, such as vegetables or birds, were also internally structured, Her results have suggested strongly that they are, and that there was a high degree of agreement about the ‘exemplariness’ of any item for any category. For example, for birds, she found the following judgements held: 10 eS Si tit ea Raita ana aia. Arenncehceee eS rrr ga AB it a icyWhat is vague language? ’ ' ical birds: i wypica) chickens, ducks, geese This is remit t 6 of clear-cut boundaries in the non- tic world’, From Rosch’s findings Lakoff suggested that sentences about category 5 such as: A penguin is a bird are judged by speakers as to degree of truth, this sentence being more true than: A bat is a bird © Lakoff further suggested that, ‘some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose meaning implicitly involves fuzziness, words whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy’ (1972: 195). These are Lakoffs ‘hedges’ —sort of, kind of, technic- ally speaking, etc. Lakoff’s idea that the function of such expressions is ‘to make things fuzzier’ is similar to the way Crystal and Davy suggest particular lexical items exist to make conversation appropri- ately imprecise. I shall suggest that Lakoff's hedges should be sub- divided into different types, for purposes of analysis, and that some of them aré vague, while others are not. Lakoff proposed what he called ‘fuzzy semantics’ in which, however, the semantic representa- tions which are arrived at in any given case are exact. Lakoff also noticed number approximations. He discussed examples like: Samantha has approximately £550 in her piggy bank Portia has saved £1,000 already this year fi) int that Portia may in fact have saved £998.27, or £1,003.85, but we will still be happy with £1,000 as an approxi- mation of what she has saved. The use of round numbers in approxi- mations is discussed in Chapter 4. Ullmann’s reason a. (the generic character of words) was discussed in the concluding speculative chapter of Fodor (1977) which raises a number of issues connected with vagueness without explicitly making the poi 11Vague Language explaining them in such terms, The causal theory of meaning, which she discusses, makes specific provision for vagueness in the sense that it attributes it to lack of knowledge about which things are of the same kind: Both for proper nouns and common nouns, one’s knowledge of the referent may be extensive or quite fragmentary. One may even have to rely on more expert members of the language community to fill in gaps, to show how to distinguish tigers from leopards or Chomsky from Halle, and perhaps even to back up one’s belief that they differ at all, But though I may be hopelessly ignorant about tigers, my word tiger still refers to tigers, because I acquired it from someone who . . . acquired it from someone who acquired it from someone who does know how to attach it to the world. The chain of communication (some kind of causal chain) ulti- mately reaches all the way back to the original event of ‘baptism’ in which tigers were given their name. (1977: 210) Such an account fits in well with Ullmann’s and Crystal and Davy's remarks about lack of knowledge leading to vagueness. Fodor notes that the fuzziness of categories discussed:by Lakoff can be explained in the same way. Lakoff’s claim that the sentence a penguin is a bird is only partly true ‘seems to rest on the view that the word bird in fact applies to whatever competent English speakers believe it applies to, and that their criteria for “birdiness” may be many and vague and can be satisfied to a greater or lesser extent’ (Fodor 1977: 212), Fodor's view of the causal theory is that it probably exaggerates ‘the extent to which referents of common nouns are genuine natural kinds’, She suggests that: A realistic view of natural language surely must recognise that ordinary people often do use the word bird without intending to include penguins, or use the word fish intending to include whales. To what extent do we really care, in our everyday conversation, whether the words we use carve nature at its joints? (ibid.: 212) and she concludes by making two speculations. Firstly, that perhaps all kind terms will eventually be found to be fuzzy. If so, then an explanation of how we use such words will have to depend on stereo- types. Her second suggestion is that the special fuzzy properties of kind terms may perhaps not be so special after all, but may be prop- 12What is vague language? erties of language in general. This is the view of Bolinger: ‘It is characteristic of natural language that no word is even limited to its enumerable senses, but carries within it the qualification of “some- hing like” ’ (1965: 567). ‘A different perspective on vagueness and language is the everyday, common-sense view that speaking vaguely includes occasions when speakers avoid giving information. Later in this chapter, 1 will show why I think such avoidance is not properly classified as vagueness, ‘One example is the sort of conversations which typically take place ipetween parents and their teenage offspring, such as the following ‘not a real example, but one that I have heard so many times between cay mother and my brothers and sister that I have no hesitation in siting it): parent: Where are you going? offspring: Out. [I] ‘The grammar of English allows its speakers to avoid giving informa- jon in several different ways, One example is the use of imperatives. Fowler and Kress (1979: 30ff.) explained how imperatives involve massive deletion of elements which are supplied by the addressee ‘from his knowledge of the non-linguistic context in which the speech act occurs’, One of their examples is: Take particular care of untrained children [rule of a school swimming club] from which they say: l order you that you will containing Agent, Patient of order, and person to whom the imperat- ive is directed, can be reconstructed, The writer of the notice, acting on behalf of the management of the school, thus withholds from the reader information about the identity of the agent. 1.3 Vagueness and communication ‘lf words and expressions are vague as often as has been suggested n the preceding pages, we might reasonably expect communication ‘sing them to be rather inefficient and unsuccessful, as suggested nformally byDeese ¥1974). A piece of experimental work carried 13