摘要

    模糊是人类自然语言的客观属性, 模糊语广泛存在于语言使用中。新闻报道具有及时性、准确性和简明性的特点。但是作为语言的一种表达形式，新闻报道中却存在着大量的模糊语言。恰当地使用模糊语，能增强新闻可信度，提高新闻时效性，使新闻报道更加生动形象。作者在大量阅读《中国日报》中的英语经济新闻后，通过分析有代表性的具体语料，从语用学角度出发，对经济新闻中的模糊语进行了探讨，从而归纳总结了模糊语在英语经济新闻中的语用功能。结果表明，英语经济类新闻报道中的模糊语在满足读者阅读心理、增加报道准确性、保护商业机密以及提高语言表达的生动性等方面具有重要的意义。

关键词：模糊语言；语用功能；模糊性；经济新闻

Abstract

Vagueness is the objective attribute of human language, and it widely consists in every aspect of language use. News reports have the characteristics of the timeliness, accuracy and conciseness. But as a kind of expression form of language, news reports contain a lot of vague language. The proper use of vague language helps to enhance the credibility of the news, improve news timeliness, and make news reports more vivid. After a lot of reading of English economic news in China Daily, the author has probed into the use of vague language in economic journalism from the perspective of pragmatics on the basis of analysis of the representative news items, thus summarized the pragmatic functions of vague language in economic journalism. The study shows that vague language employed in economic journalism plays a vital role in satisfying the reading psychology of readers, increasing the accuracy of economic news reporting, protecting the business secrets and improving the vitality of linguistic expressions in economic journalism.

Key words: vague language; pragmatic functions; vagueness; economic journalism

1.    Introduction
    Vagueness is one of the essential attributes of language, and it widely consists in every aspect of language use. It was the American well-known professor L. A. Zadeh who, at the earliest, constructed “vagueness” as a language theory. In 1965, professor L. A. Zadeh published the article Fuzzy Sets, presenting that the objects in the physical world usually do not have accurate boundaries, which plays a significant role in people's abstract thought and the process of information transfer, and also suggests that the cognitive ability of human is characterized with a kind of vagueness. People have to use language to understand the real world and proceed abstract thinking, thus making language get the property of vagueness. Later, the study of vagueness gradually received much attention and flourished in 1970s when many linguists, such as Lakoff, Crystal, Davy, etc., began to study vagueness from different aspects of language.