【正文】 her objects in virtue of their mon elements. When a girl learns that her cat has a nictating membrane that protects its eyes, she rightly expects her neighbor39。. Philosophers have contributed a lot to the study of vague language, but I don’t agree with their viewpoint that vagueness is only a property of language, not of the world itself. Vague language is a reflection of the objective world and people’s subjective behavior. The direction of fit of language and the world is most often that language is required to fit the world. And the world makes demands on language in two different ways. Firstly, the world is, as we know, constantly changing and developing, making quite new demands on language which is to reflect the world. For language to be fully useful, therefore, in the sense of being able to describe all of human beings’ experience, language must incorporate builtin flexibility. This flexibility resides, in part, in its capacity for vagueness. Secondly, many things in the world which language reflects are themselves vague, or are perceived by us as vague. Therefore, language has to be vague in order to truly reflect the world. refers to a precise period and at the end of the month you will be able to definitely say whether I kept my promise. But if one says `I will see you again in the near future39。 is itself an ambiguous concept, having several different meanings. One of them can be defined as follows: a linguistic term is vague if there are no definite criteria for its application. Thus, vagueness is a property of language, and not of the world itself. Typical examples of vague propositions in the geographical domain are: ‘All mountains are very high’, and ‘Near the marsh is a dense thicket’. Terms such as mountains, marsh and thicket are vague feature classifiers, near is a vague relation, high and dense are vague adjectives. So, even quite simple geographical statements can contain several kinds of vagueness. Vagueness in this sense is thought to be sharply differentiated from uncertainty, which is a distinct, though interacting, phenomenon. Uncertainty arises from lack of exact knowledge about an object or situation, and is thus an epistemic state rather than a feature of language. In these philosophers’ view, vagueness is also sometimes confused with generality. If one says `I shall see you again later this month39。vague39。 I have been arguing for some years now … that the correspondence between the ideas possessed by two individuals who are in munication on a mon topic is rather poor, a condition which we ordinarily do not notice because we seldom make explicit attempts to validate a municated idea against 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 linguistic utterance we hear. ④ Derek Davy: Investigating English StyleThe discipline of psychologyThey conclude, ‘Native speakers manipulate their language in this way all the time in informal speech’.③ Thirdly, they mention ways of expressing number approximations: a class of thirty odd, there were about/around thirty, and there were getting on for thirty. They note also the existence of prefixes and suffixes which are frequently used to express approximation, when precision is not of primary concern. For examples:that ‘their spelling is somewhat uncertain, since they are features of the spoken language only’. Crystal and Davy 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 thingy, thingummy, thingamajig. They mention (c) the subject of the conversation has no requirement for precision, and an approximation or characterization will do。Vagueness, or as they call it, imprecision, is referred to in a very different context by Crystal and Davy, in an applied linguistics textbook which contains a series of recordings of natural conversations. Analyzing conversational English from the point of view of helping the foreign learner, Crystal and Davy state that ‘lack of precision is one of the most important features of the vocabulary of informal conversation’. 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. Crystal and Davy give four reasons for vagueness: (a) memory loss – the speaker forgets the correct word。 so 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。Chapter Two Vague Language What is vague language?Interest in vagueness has arisen in a number of disciplines: linguistics, psychology, philosophy, etc. In this chapter I would like to introduce the general notion of vague language by outlining some existing approaches in the three disciplines.The discipline of linguistics Ullmann in an essay entitled ‘Words with blurred edges’ traced from Plato to Byron a recurrent feeling of the inadequacy of language to express thought, particularly because language is lack of precision. He noted also the converse feeling among poets and creative writers that such vagueness is in fact an advantage. This idea has also been reflected by Wittgenstein 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 the indistinct one often exactly what we need?’Ullman 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 v