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Revised version of a keynote lecture given at the 3rd Languages in the Globalised World International Conference, Leeds Beckett University, Leeds, UK, 23 May 2018.
1. Being clear about vagueness
Vagueness is pervasive in everyday language. English offers numerous ways in which we can blur or make less precise the things we say and write. Things in what I've just said is a good example: what are those ‘things’? Conversations? Essays? Emails? Tweets? Confessions? Promises? It could be all or any. By using things, I give myself a let-out from being challenged for having omitted important items, and I give you a bit of scope to conceptualise what kinds of ‘things’ I might be talking about. I may not even be sure myself what all these ‘things’ are. The noun thing is versatile; despite its apparent countability and its perfectly paired uncountable partner stuff, thing can be used of animate and non-animate entities and of countable and uncountable ones (as can stuff). Cutting (2006) has some interesting examples of the use of thing. English also offers an array of vague quantifiers when we cannot, or do not want to be precise about numbers and quantities, my favourite example being, from some years back, a police spokesman in London who announced to the press after a tumultuous street demonstration that ‘approximately eleven people were arrested’. Such usage, odd when put under the microscope of linguistic scrutiny, passes generally unnoticed in everyday use. Other morphemes, words and phrases also allow us to de-focus from precise commitment to sharp-edged notions; you can be hungry-ish, an object can be yellowy in colour, and we can be sort of tired or find something kind of irritating. Such usage is normal, especially in conversational language; it is not ‘lazy’ or ‘evasive’, and normal conversation would be impossible without it. But what about the straight-talking world of business and the detailed and precise world of academia?
Vagueness is well-covered in the literature; Channell (1994) looks at a range of vague lexis, including quantifiers, and vague words such as whatsisname when the speaker can't find the right word. Cutting's (2007) edited volume has papers on the types of vagueness I have just illustrated and more....