【正文】 vertisers greater room to undertake their responsibility, and consumers, according to their own understanding, can determine whether to buy it or 22 not. Probably the best beer in the world. ( Carlsberg Beer) The world is full of good looking women. But some really stops you. They39。s not abandoned at all. Sometimes, the use of pronouns will give us a sense of neatness. For instance, You are loving it.(McDonald) From the perspective of cognitive linguistics, the demonstrative pronouns, like it, that, this, here, there, are fuzzy in themselves. Here, the word 39。 attention. For example, In TaiBei 1+1+1+1=ONE (an ad in TaiBei Business Center） We are all certain that four ones make four, but here four ones make ONE. This leads us consumers eager to know the real intentions of the ad, and, at the same time, stimulate our imagination. The four ones in the ad, in fact, refer to the four parts of the business center. And these four parts working together make a business center. This usage is really innovative. Take another example, Is 2 months salary too much to spend of something that lasts forever? (diamond advertisement) In this ad, the spiritual enjoyment brought by diamonds, which can only be expressed by vague language, is uncertain and beyond description. 16 While although 2 months salary is a precise numeral, it can?t convey the specific number of it. Through this kind of vague language it indicates that you just need to pay a small sum of money then you can get something of permanent value. From the above, we learn that numerals, which is seemingly exact but, in fact, with vague concept, caters to the consumers who pay attention to the accurate expression of ads. Use of Other Parts of Speech to Express Vagueness i. Nouns Nouns often serve as modifiers in ads. They differentiate one product from the other by providing information about quality, specification and other technical information of the goods. On many occasions, there is a clear relationship between the noun modifier and the modified noun. However, the former can be of great vagueness. And the ads, making use of this feature, can achieve unexpected effect. For example, It is the taste! (Nescafe) You can feel the feature in Philips design. (Philips Electronics) The meaning of the two nouns feature and taste in the above two cases is absolutely indefinite. We have no idea of the features of Philips design or the taste of Nescafe, until we have experienced or tasted it. Hence, it can be learned that it39。s mon to use numerals in advertising language, because it can increase the credibility of the products. However, the numerals in ads are often used in a vague sense. When a numeral doesn39。t specify which meaning it refers to in the ad. Likewise, in the latter example, it also doesn39。t need exact figures to present its diameter, the length of the watch strap and its service life. The use of vague language in ads would manifest the good quality and perfect shape of the watch. 13 There is another reason for the activeness of adjectives in ads. For they have parative and superlative forms. There is a wellknown Chinese ad , “沒有最好，只有更好 ”(No best, only better). This kind of vague expression helps extend the content of ads, and leave a space of imagination for the consumers. For example： You are more beautiful with Kodak． (Kodak film) Let39。s attitude indirectly by quoting the opinion of a third person, such as according to one’s estimates, someone says that... etc.. 8 2 Vague Language in Advertisement Our daily life is filled with vagueness, and it?s actually an inherent characteristic of natural language. In this chapter, we will focus on the vague language which is used in ads. Reasons for the existence of vague language in advertisement Vague language is full of fuzziness, while advertising promotion requires clear intention. Since vague language is semantically vague, why is it widely used in advertising language? Language itself is vague Linguistic signs are inadequate. In accordance with this view, vagueness of language is essentially a matter of the way language relates to the world. Sometimes we may express vagueness by means of metaphor. For example, there isn?t a specific word to express the concept of the mouth of a river（河口） or the foot of a mountain(山腳 ) both in Chinese and English. But sometimes, we even can?t find a metaphor to express some vague concept. For instance, Recently, things have been going really well. Here things is a vague word which refers to life in general. The world, as we know, is much more plex than language, which is dynamic and forever changing, so are our minds, whereas 9 linguistic signs are limited and language is lagged correspondingly, which results in the inadequacy of words to express the world, human39。s. It can also be further divided into two types, plausibility(直接緩和語 ) and attribution(間接緩和語 ). The former refers to the speaker39。t change the truth condition of a proposition. For example, They told me that they are married. Here, the action that they told me is a shield. Whether the speaker utters this sentence with or without the action that they told me, the truth condition of this sentence will keep the same. The major function of shield is to soften the tone of speech by pointing out whether the view is the speaker himself39。 b. it is‘purposely and unabashedly vague’。 for it is 4 precisely because those questions never did, or did not frequently, present themselves that his habit remained indeterminate.(Channell 2020:7) Later H. P. Grice also offers a definition for vagueness: To say that an expression is vague(in a broad sense of vagueness)is presumably, roughly speaking, to say that there are case