Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • Cited by 41
Publisher:
Cambridge University Press
Online publication date:
August 2015
Print publication year:
2015
Online ISBN:
9781139236218

Book description

Elastic language carries non-specific and stretchable meaning, as in 'He loves her, kind of'. It is used like a slingshot, targeting various strategic goals. Consolidating current research and charting new directions, this book develops a refreshing theory of elasticity, empirically attested by natural language data from tension-prone encounters between Australian Customs officers and passengers. The theory proposes three principles (fluidity, stretchability and strategy) and offers a systematic look at how elastic language, as a sliding scale, works to balance strengthening and weakening speech tones, to firm and soften a speaker's stance, and to reveal and evade the truth. The comparative analysis of forms, functions, and context confirms that elastic language is fluid, stretchable, and strategic. It serves both cooperative and competitive functions, and social and speech factors impact on its use. This book will appeal to students and researchers working in pragmatics, applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis, and communication.

Reviews

'All in all, Zhang’s book makes a great contribution to the field by filling a significant theoretical gap. The conceptual framework developed and tested throughout the book has the potential to contribute not only to studies on VL use, but also to other areas of linguistic investigation.'

Vahid Parvaresh Source: Discourse Studies

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

References

Adolphs, S. (2006), Advances in corpus linguistics. Journal of Pragmatics 38(2): 292–6.
Adolphs, S., Atkins, S. and Harvey, K. (2007), Caught between professional requirements and interpersonal needs: vague language in healthcare contexts. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 6278. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Adolphs, S., Brown, B., Carter, R., Crawford, C. and Sahota, O. (2004), Applying corpus linguistics in a health care context. Journal of Applied Linguistics 1(1): 928.
Aijmer, K. (1984), ‘Sort of’ and ‘kind of’ in English conversation. Studia Linguistica 38: 118–28.
Aijmer, K. (1985), What happens at the end of our utterances? The use of utterance-final tags introduced by and and or. In O. Togeby (ed.), Papers from the Eighth Scandinavian Conference of Linguistics, pp. 366–89. Institut for Nordisk Filologi, Københavns Universitet.
Aijmer, K. (1997), I think: an English modal particle. In Swan, T. and Westvik, O. J. (eds), Modality in Germanic Languages: Historical and Comparative Perspectives, pp. 147. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Aijmer, K. (2002), English Discourse Particles: Evidence from a Corpus. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Aijmer, K. (2013), Understanding Pragmatic Markers: A Variational Pragmatic Approach. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Andersen, G. (2010), A contrastive approach to vague nouns. In Kaltenböck, G., Mihatsch, W. and Schneider, S. (eds), New Approaches to Hedging, pp. 3548. Bingley (UK): Emerald.
Anderson, J. (1973), Universal quantifiers. Lingua 31: 125–76.
Ariel, M. (2000), Defining Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Atkinson, J. M. and Heritage, J., eds (1984), Structures of Social Action. Studies in Conversation Analysis. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Austin, J. L. (1962), Sense and Sensibilia. Oxford: Clarendon Press.
Banfield, A. (1973), Narrative style and the grammar of direct and indirect speech. Foundations of Language 10: 139.
Bavelas, J. B., Black, A., Chovil, N. and Mullett, J. (1990), Equivocal Communication. Newbury Park (CA): Sage.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (1999), Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English. London: Longman.
Biber, D., Johansson, S., Leech, G., Conrad, S. and Finegan, E. (2010), Longman Grammar of Spoken and Written English, 8th edition. London: Longman.
Birner, B. J. (2013), Introduction to Pragmatics. West Sussex: Wiley-Blackwell.
Blakemore, D. (1992), Understanding Utterances: An Introduction to Pragmatics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1990), ‘You don't touch lettuce with your fingers’: parental politeness in family discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 259–88.
Blum-Kulka, S. (1992), The metapragmatics of politeness in Israeli society. In Watts, R. J., Ide, S. and Ehlich, K. (eds), Politeness in Language: Studies in its History, Theory and Practice, pp. 255–80. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Blum-Kulka, S., House, J. and Kasper, G. (1989), Cross-Cultural Pragmatics: Requests and Apologies. Norwood (NJ): Ablex.
Bolinger, D. (1961), Generality, Gradience, and the All-or-None. The Hague: Mouton.
Bolinger, D. (1965), The atomization of meaning. Language 41(4): 555–73.
Bolinger, D. (1972), Degree Words. The Hague: Mouton.
Bolinger, D. (1975), Aspects of Language. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.
Bradac, J. J. and Street, R. L. Jr (1989/90), Powerful and powerless styles of talk: a theoretical analysis of language and impression formation. Research on Language and Social Interaction 23: 195241.
Bradac, J. J., Mulac, A. and Thompson, S. A. (1995), Men's and women's use of intensifiers and hedges in problem-solving interaction: molar and molecular analyses. Research on Language and Social Interaction 28(2): 93116.
Briggs, C. L. (1997), Introduction: from the ideal, the ordinary, and the orderly to conflict and violence in pragmatic research. Pragmatics 7(4): 451–59.
Brockway, D. (1981), Semantic constraints on relevance. In Parret, H., Sbisà, M. and Verschueren, J. (eds), Possibilities and Limitations of Pragmatics, pp. 5778. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Brown, P. (1980), How and why are women more polite: some evidence from a Mayan community. In McConnell-Ginet, S., Borker, R. and Furman, N. (eds), Women and Language in Literature and Society, pp. 111–36. New York: Praeger.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1978), Universals in language usage: politeness phenomena. In Goody, E. N. (ed.), Questions and Politeness: Strategies in Social Interaction, pp. 56311. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Brown, P. and Levinson, S. C. (1987), Politeness: Some Universals in Language Usage. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Bucholtz, M. and Hall, K. (2005), Identity and interaction: a sociocultural linguistic approach. Discourse Studies 7(4–5): 585614.
Burnett, H. (2012), The puzzle(s) of absolute adjectives on vagueness, comparison, and the origin of scale structure. UCLA Working Papers in Linguistics: Papers in Semantics 16: 150.
Bybee, J. (2004), Mechanisms of chance in grammaticization: the role of frequency. In Joseph, B. D. and Janda, R. D. (eds), The Handbook of Historical Linguistics, pp. 602–23. Malden (MA): Blackwell.
Caffi, C. (1999), On mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics 31: 881909.
Carter, R. (1980), The language of sisterhood. In Michaels, L. and Ricks, C. (eds), The State of the Language, pp. 226–34. Berkeley (CA): University of California Press.
Carter, R. (1998), Orders of reality: CANCODE, communication, and culture. ELT Journal 52(1): 4356.
Carter, R. (2003), The grammar of talk: spoken English, grammar and the classroom. New Perspectives on English in the Classroom, pp. 513. London: Qualifications and Curriculum Authority.
Carter, E. (2013), Analysing Police Interviews: Laughter, Confessions and the Tape. London: Continuum.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (1997), Exploring Spoken English. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2004), This, that and the other: multi-word clusters in spoken English as visible patterns of interaction. TEANGA 21: 3052.
Carter, R. and McCarthy, M. (2006), Cambridge Grammar of English: A Comprehensive Guide. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Channell, J. (1990), Precise and vague quantities in writing on economics. In Nash, W. (ed.), The Writing Scholar: Studies in the Language and Conventions of Academic Discourse, pp. 95117. Beverly Hills: Sage.
Channell, J. (1994), Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Chapman, S. (2011), Pragmatics. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Chase, S. (1950), The Tyranny of Words, 7th edition. London: Methuen.
Chefneux, G. (2012), Mitigation at work: functions and lexical realisations. In Măda, S. and Săftoiu, R. (eds), Professional Communication across Languages and Cultures, pp. 169–92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Chen, W. Z. and Wu, S. X. (2002), Fanchou yu Mohu Yuyi Yanjiu (in Chinese) [A Study on Category and Semantic Fuzziness]. Fujian (China): Fujian Renmin Press.
Cheng, W. (2007), The use of vague language across spoken genres in an intercultural Hong Kong corpus. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 161–81. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Cheng, W. and O'Keeffe, A. (2014), Vagueness. In Rühlemann, C. and Aijmer, K. (eds), Corpus Pragmatics: A Handbook, pp. 360–78. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cheng, W. and Tsui, A. B. M. (2009), ‘Ahh ((laugh)) well there is no comparison between the two I think’: how do Hong Kong Chinese and native speakers of English disagree with each other? Journal of Pragmatics 41(11): 2365–80.
Cheng, W. and Warren, M. (2001), The use of vague language in intercultural conversations in Hong Kong. English World-Wide 22(1): 81104.
Cheng, W. and Warren, M. (2003), Indirectness, inexplicitness and vagueness made clearer. Pragmatics 13(3): 381400.
Chierchia, G. (2004), Scalar implicatures, polarity phenomena, and the syntax/pragmatics interface. In Belletti, A. (ed.), Structures and Beyond: The Cartography of Syntactic Structures 3, pp. 39103. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Clark, B. (2013), Relevance Theory. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Clark, H. H. and Wilkes-Gibbs, D. (1986), Referring as a collaborative process. In Clark, H. H. (ed.), Arenas of Language Use, pp. 107–43. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Coleman, L. and Kay, P. (1981), Prototype semantics: the English word lie. Language 57(1): 2644.
Conrad, S. and Biber, D. (2000), Adverbial marking of stance in speech and writing. In Hunston, S. and Thompson, G. (eds), Evaluation in Text: Authorial Stance and the Construction of Discourse, pp. 5673. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Cook, G. (2007), ‘This we have done’: the vagueness of poetry and public relations. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 2139. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Cotterill, J. (2007), ‘I think he was kind of shouting or something’: uses and abuses of vagueness in the British courtroom. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 97114. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Creswell, J. W. (1994), Research Design: Qualitative and Quantitative Approaches. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Creswell, J. W. (2008), Educational Research: Planning, Conducting, and Evaluating Quantitative and Qualitative Research, 3rd edition. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Creswell, J. W. (2009), Research Design: Qualitative, Quantitative, and Mixed Methods Approaches, 3rd edition. Los Angeles: Sage.
Creswell, J. W. and Clark, V. L. Plano (2007), Designing and Conducting Mixed Methods Research. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Cruse, A. (1986), Lexical Semantics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Cruse, A. (2006), A Glossary of Semantics and Pragmatics. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Crystal, D. (2008), A Dictionary of Linguistics and Phonetics, 6th edition. Malden (MA): Blackwell.
Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1969), Investigating English Style. New York: Longman.
Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1975), Advanced Conversational English, 5th edition. London: Longman.
Crystal, D. and Davy, D. (1979), Advanced Conversational English, 8th edition. London: Longman.
Cutting, J. (1998), The function of inexplicit language in ‘CANCODE’ casual conversations. Conference paper presented at Sociolinguistics Symposium 12, University of London.
Cutting, J. (2000), Vague language and international students. In Cutting, J. (ed.), The Grammar of Spoken English and EAP Teaching, pp. 3954. Sunderland: University of Sunderland Press.
Cutting, J. (2001), Speech acts of the in-group. Journal of Pragmatics 33(8): 1207–33.
Cutting, J. (2002), The in-group code lexis. Hermes Journal of Linguistics 28: 5980.
Cutting, J., ed. (2007), Vague Language Explored. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Cutting, J. (2008), Pragmatics and Discourse, 2nd edition. London: Routledge.
Daitz, E. (1956), The picture theory of meaning. In Flew, A. (ed.), Essays in Conceptual Analysis, pp. 5374. London: Macmillan.
Deese, J. (1974), Towards a psychological theory of the meaning of sentences. In Silverstein, A. (ed.), Human Communication: Theoretical Explorations, pp. 6780. Hillsdale (NJ): Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Dines, E. R. (1980), Variation in discourse: ‘and stuff like that’. Language in Society 9: 1331.
Dobson, I. (2010), Mind your language! Advocate: Journal of the National Tertiary Education Union (Australia) 17(4): 28.
Dörnyei, Z. (2007), Research Methods in Applied Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Drave, N. (2002), Vaguely speaking: a corpus approach to vague language in intercultural conversations. In Peters, P., Collins, P. and Smith, A. (eds), Language and Computers: New Frontiers of Corpus Research 16 (Papers from the Twenty-First International Conference of English Language Research and Computerized Corpora), pp. 2540. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
Drew, P. (1992), Contested evidence in courtroom cross-examination: the case of a trial for rape. In Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (eds), Talk at Work, pp. 470520. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (1992), Analyzing talk at work: an introduction. In Drew, P. and Heritage, J. (eds), Talk at Work, pp. 365. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Du Bois, B. L. (1987), ‘Something on the order of around forty to forty-four’: imprecise numerical expressions in biomedical slide talks. Language in Society 16(4): 527–41.
Du Bois, J. W. (2007), The stance triangle. In Englebretson, R. (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, pp. 139–82. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Duffley, P. J. and Larrivée, P. (2012), Exploring the relation between the qualitative and quantitative uses of the determiner some. English Language and Linguistics 16(1):131–49.
Ediger, A. (1995a), An analysis of set-marking tags in the English language. PhD thesis, University of California.
Ediger, A. (1995b), Vague language. Applied Linguistics 16(1): 127–31.
Eisenberg, E. M. (1998), Flirting with meaning. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 17(1): 97108.
Englebretson, R. (2007), Stancetaking in discourse: an introduction. In Englebretson, R. (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, pp. 125. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Evison, J., McCarthy, M. and O'Keeffe, A. (2007), ‘Looking out for love and all the rest of it’: vague category markers as shared social space. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 138–57. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Fairclough, N. (1989), Language and Power. London: Longman.
Fairclough, N. (1992), Discourse and Social Change. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Fillmore, C. J. (1982), Frame semantics. In Linguistic Society of Korea (ed.), Linguistics in the Morning Calm, pp. 111–37. Seoul: Hanshin Publishing Company.
Fodor, J. D. (1977), Semantics: Theories of Meaning in Generative Grammar. New York: Crowell.
Fowler, R. (1985), Power. In van Dijk, T. (ed.), Handbook of Discourse Analysis vol. 4: Discourse Analysis in Society, pp. 6182. Orlando (FL): Academic Press.
Fraser, B. (1980), Conversational mitigation. Journal of Pragmatics 4(4): 341–50.
Fraser, B. (2010), Pragmatic competence: the case of hedging. In Kaltenböck, G., Mihatsch, W. and Schneider, S. (eds), New Approaches to Hedging, pp. 1534. Bingley (UK): Emerald.
Fronek, J. (1982), Thing as a function word. Linguistics 20: 633–54.
Gassner, D. (2012), Vague language that is rarely vagueP: a case study of ‘thing’ in L1 and L2 discourse. International Review of Pragmatics 4(1): 328.
Gazdar, G. (1979), Pragmatics: Implicature, Presupposition, and Logical Form. New York: Academic Press.
Geeraerts, D. (1989), Introduction: prospects and problems of prototype theory. Linguistics 27(4): 587612.
Geeraerts, D. (2006a), Introduction: a rough guide to cognitive linguistics. In Geeraerts, D. (ed.), Cognitive Linguistics: Basic Readings, pp. 128. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Geeraerts, D., ed. (2006b), Words and Other Wonders: Papers on Lexical and Semantic Topics. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Glinert, L. (2010), Apologizing to China: elastic apologies and the meta-discourse of American diplomats. Intercultural Pragmatics 7(1): 4774.
Goffman, E. (1974), Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Boston: Northeastern University Press.
Goffman, E. (1981), Forms of Talk. Philadelphia: University of Philadelphia Press.
Grice, P. H. (1975), Logic and conversation. In Cole, P. and Morgan, J. L. (eds), Syntax and Semantics vol. 3: Speech Acts, pp. 4158. New York: Academic Press.
Gu, Y. G. (1990), Politeness phenomena in modern Chinese. Journal of Pragmatics 14: 237–57.
Guilbaud, G. (1977), Mathematics and approximation. In Asher, H. and Kunle, H. (eds), Proceedings of the Third International Conference on Mathematics Education, pp. 125–34. Norwood (NJ): Ablex.
Gumperz, J. (1982), Discourse Strategies. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Halliday, M. A. K. and Hasan, R. (1985), Language, Context and Text: Aspects of Language in a Social-Semiotic Perspective. Burwood: Deakin University Press.
Hamilton, M. and Mineo, P. J. (1998), A framework for understanding equivocation. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 17: 335.
Handford, M. (2010), The Language of Business Meetings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hatch, E. and Brown, C. (1995), Vocabulary, Semantics and Language Education. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Hinkel, E. (2003), Adverbial markers and tone in L1 and L2 students’ writing. Journal of Pragmatics 35: 10491068.
Holdcroft, D. (1979), Speech acts and conversation I. Philosophical Quarterly 29: 125–41.
Holmes, J. (1982), Expressing doubt and certainty in English. RELC Journal 13(2): 928.
Holmes, J. (1985), Sex differences and miscommunication: some data from New Zealand. In Pride, J. B. (ed.), Cross-Cultural Encounters: Communication and Miscommunication, pp. 2443. Melbourne: River Seine.
Holmes, J. (1990), Hedges and boosters in women's and men's speech. Language and Communication 10(3): 185205.
Holmes, J. (1995), Women, Men and Politeness. London: Longman.
Holmes, J. (2000), Women at work: analysing women's talk in New Zealand workplaces. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics 22(2): 117.
Holmes, J. (2006), Gendered Talk at Work. Oxford: Blackwell.
Horn, L. R. (1972), On the semantic properties of logical operators in English. PhD thesis, University of California.
Huang, Y. (2012), The Oxford Dictionary of Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hübler, A. (1983), Understatements and Hedges in English. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hurford, J. R. (1987), Language and Number. Oxford: Blackwell.
Hutchby, I. and Wooffitt, R. (1998), Conversation Analysis: Principles, Practices and Applications. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Hyland, K. (1998a) Boosting, hedging and the negotiation of academic knowledge. Text 18(3): 349–82.
Hyland, K. (1998b), Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Hyland, K. (1998c), Persuasion and context: the pragmatics of academic metadiscourse. Journal of Pragmatics 30: 437–55.
Hyland, K. (2000), Hedges, boosters and lexical invisibility: noticing modifiers in academic texts. Language Awareness 9(4): 179–97.
Ide, S. (1989), Formal forms and discernment: two neglected aspects of universals of linguistic politeness. Multilingua 8(2/3): 223–48.
Iklé, F. C. (1968), How Nations Negotiate. New York: Praeger.
Jaffe, A. (2012), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Janicki, K. (2002), A hindrance to communication: the use of difficult and incomprehensible language. International Journal of Applied Linguistics 12(2): 194217.
Janney, R. W. (2002), Cotext as context: vague answers in court. Language and Communication 22: 457–75.
Jefferson, G. (1990), List construction as a task and resource. In Psathas, G. (ed.), Interaction Competence, pp. 6392. Lanham (MD): University Press of America.
Jick, T. D. (1979), Mixing qualitative and quantitative methods: triangulation in action. Administrative Science Quarterly 24: 602–11.
Jucker, A. H. (1993), The discourse marker well: a relevance theoretical account. Journal of Pragmatics 19(5): 435–52.
Jucker, A. H., Smith, S. W. and Lüdge, T. (2003), Interactive aspects of vagueness in conversation. Journal of Pragmatics 35(12): 1737–69.
Kaltenböck, G. (2013), Development of comment clauses. In Aarts, B., Close, J., Leech, G. and Wallis, S. (eds), The Verb Phrase in English: Investigating Recent Change with Corpora, pp. 286317. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kaltenböck, G., Mihatsch, W. and Schneider, S., eds (2010), New Approaches to Hedging. Bingley (UK): Emerald.
Kasper, G. (1999), Data collection in pragmatics research. University of Hawaii Working Papers in ESL 18 (1): 71107.
Kay, P. (1984), The kind of/sort of construction. In Brugman, C. (ed.), Proceedings of the Tenth Annual Meeting of the Berkeley Linguistics Society, pp. 157–71. Berkeley (CA): BLS, University of California.
Kay, P. (2004), Pragmatic aspects of grammatical constructions. In Horn, L. R. and Ward, G. (eds), The Handbook of Pragmatics, pp. 675700. Malden (MA): Blackwell.
Kärkkäinen, E. (2003), Epistemic Stance in English Conversation: A Description of its Interactional Functions, with a Focus on I think. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kärkkäinen, E. (2007), The role of I guess in conversational stancetaking. In Englebretson, R. (ed.), Stancetaking in Discourse: Subjectivity, Evaluation, Interaction, pp. 183219. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Kärkkäinen, E. (2010), Position and scope of epistemic phrases in planned and unplanned American English. In Kaltenböck, G., Mihatsch, W. and Schneider, S. (eds), New Approaches to Hedging, pp. 203–36. Bingley (UK): Emerald.
Kärkkäinen, E. (2012), I thought it was very interesting: conversational formats for taking a stance. Journal of Pragmatics 44(15): 2194–210.
Kecskes, I. (2014), Intercultural Pragmatics. New York: Oxford University Press
Kendon, A. (2004), Gesture: Visible Action as Utterance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Kiesling, S. F. (2009), Style as stance: stance as the explanation for patterns of sociolinguistic variation. In Jaffe, A. (ed.), Stance: Sociolinguistic Perspectives, pp. 171–94. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Kirkpatrick, A. (1991), Information sequencing in Mandarin in letters of request. Anthropological Linguistics 33(2): 183203.
Koester, A. (2006), Investigating Workplace Discourse. London: Routledge.
Koester, A. (2007), ‘About twelve thousand or so’: vagueness in North American and UK offices. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 4061. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Koester, A. (2010), Workplace Discourse. London: Continuum.
Kong, K. (2013), Epilogue: what makes Chinese unique in discourse and interaction? In Pan, Y. L. and Kádár, D. Z. (eds), Chinese Discourse and Interaction: Theory and Practice, pp. 310–20. London: Equinox.
Labov, W. (1972), Sociolinguistic Patterns. Pennsylvania: University of Pennsylvania Press.
Lakoff, G. (1973), Hedges: a study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts. Journal of Philosophical Logic 2(4): 458508.
Lakoff, G. (1987), Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal about the Mind. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Lakoff, G. and Johnson, M. (1999), Philosophy in the Flesh. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, R. T. (1990), Talking Power: The Politics of Language. New York: Basic Books.
Lakoff, R. T. (2000), The Language War. Berkeley(CA): University of California Press.
Langacker, R. W. (1986), An introduction to cognitive grammar. Cognitive Science 10(1): 140.
Larrivée, P. and Duffley, P. (2014), The emergence of implicit meaning: scalar implicatures with some. International Journal of Corpus Linguistics 19(4): 530–47.
Leech, G. (1983), Principles of Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Lehrer, A. (1975), Talking about wine. Language 51(4): 901–23.
Levinson, S. C. (1983), Pragmatics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Levinson, S. C. (2000), Presumptive Meanings: The Theory of Generalized Conversational Implicature. Cambridge (MA): MIT Press.
Lewis, D. (1979), Scorekeeping in a language game. Journal of Philosophical Logic 8: 339–59.
Linell, P. and Bredmar, M. (1996), Reconstructing topical sensitivity: aspects of face-work in talks between midwives and expectant mothers. Research on Language and Social Interaction 29(4): 347–79.
Lyons, J. (1981), Language, Meaning and Context. London: Fontana.
Macaulay, R. K. S. (1991), Locating Dialect in Discourse: The Language of Honest Men and Bonnie Lasses in Ayr. New York: Oxford University Press.
Martinich, A. P. (1980), Conversational maxims and some philosophical problems. The Philosophical Quarterly 30: 215–28.
Martinovski, B. (2006), Framework for analysis of mitigation in courts. Journal of Pragmatics 38(12): 2065–86.
Matthews, P. H. (1997), The Concise Dictionary of Linguistics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Mauranen, A. (2004), ‘They're a little bit different …’: observations on hedges in academic talk. In Aijmer, K. and Stenström, A. B. (eds), Discourse Patterns in Spoken and Written Corpora, pp. 173–97. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Maynard, S. K. (1993), Discourse Modality: Subjectivity, Emotion and Voice in the Japanese Language. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McCarthy, M. J. (1998), Spoken Language and Applied Linguistics. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
McCarthy, M. J. and Carter, R. A. (1997), Grammar, tails and affect: constructing expressive choices in discourse. Text 17(3): 231–52.
McCarthy, M. J. and Handford, M. (2004), ‘Invisible to us’: a preliminary corpus-based study of spoken business English. In Connor, U. and Upton, T. (eds), Discourse in the Professions: Perspectives from Corpus Linguistics. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
McCarthy, M. J., O'Keeffe, A. and Walsh, S. (2005), ‘Post-colonialism, multi-culturalism, structuralism, feminism, post-modernism and so on and so forth’: vague language in academic discourse, a comparative analysis of form, function and context. Conference paper presented at AAACL/ICAME Conference, University of Michigan.
McCawley, J. D. (1981), Everything that Linguists Have Always Wanted to Know about Logic, but Were Ashamed to Ask. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Mehl, M. R., Vazire, S., Ramírez-Esparza, N., Slatcher, R. B. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2007), Are women really more talkative than men? Science 317(5834): 82.
Metsä-Ketelä, M. (2006), ‘Words are more or less superfluous’: the case of more or less in academic lingua franca English. Nordic Journal of English Studies 5(2): 117–43.
Mey, J. L. (1993), Pragmatics: An Introduction. Oxford: Blackwell.
Mey, J. L. (2001), Pragmatics: An Introduction, 2nd edition. Malden (MA): Blackwell.
Morris, W. C. (1938), Foundations of the Theory of Signs, special issue of International Encyclopaedia of Unified Science 1(2). Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.
Morse, J. M. (1991), Approaches to qualitative–quantitative methodological triangulation. Nursing Research 40: 120–23.
Mortensen, C. D. (1997), Miscommunication. Thousand Oaks: Sage.
Moxey, L. and Sanford, A. (1993), Communicating Quantities: A Psychological Perspective. Hove (UK): Lawrence Erlbaum.
Moxey, L. and Sanford, A. (1997), Choosing the right quantifier: usage in the context of communication. In Givón, T. (ed.), Conversation: Cognitive, Communicative and Social Perspectives, pp. 207–31. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Murphy, B. (2010), Corpus and Sociolinguistics: Investigating Age and Gender in Female Talk. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Myers, G. (1989), The pragmatics of politeness in scientific articles. Applied Linguistics 10: 135.
Newman, M. L., Groom, C. J., Handelman, L. D. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2008), Gender differences in language use: an analysis of 14,000 text samples. Discourse Processes 45: 211–36.
Ochs, E. (1996), Linguistic resources for socializing humanity. In Gumperz, J. and Levinson, S. (eds), Rethinking Linguistic Relativity, pp. 407–37. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Okamoto, S. (2002), Ideology and social meanings: rethinking the relationship between language, politeness, and gender. In Benor, S., Rose, M., Sharma, D., Sweetland, J. and Zhang, Q. (eds), Gendered Practices in Language, pp. 91113. Stanford (CA): Center for the Study of Language and Information Publications.
O'Keeffe, A. (2002), Exploring indices of national identity in a corpus of radio phone-in data from Irish radio. In Sanchez-Macarro, A. (ed.), Windows on the World: Media Discourse in English. Valencia (Spain): University of Valencia Press.
O'Keeffe, A. (2003), ‘Like the wise virgins and all that jazz’: using a corpus to examine vague language and shared knowledge. In Connor, U. and Upton, T. (eds), Applied Corpus Linguistics: A Multidimensional Perspective, pp. 120. Amsterdam: Rodopi.
O'Keeffe, A. (2004), ‘How to be vague and that kind of thing’. Presented at the 38th International Association of Teachers of English as a Foreign Language Conference, Liverpool.
O'Keeffe, A. (2006), Investigating Media Discourse. London: Routledge.
O'Keeffe, A., McCarthy, M. and Carter, R. (2007), From Corpus to Classroom: Language Use and Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Overstreet, M. (1995), The form and function of general extenders in English interactive discourse. PhD thesis, The University of Hawaii.
Overstreet, M. (1999), Whales, Candlelight, and Stuff Like That: General Extenders in English Discourse. New York: Oxford University Press
Overstreet, M. and Yule, G. (1997a), On being explicit and stuff in contemporary American English. Journal of English Linguistics 25(3): 250–58.
Overstreet, M. and Yule, G. (1997b), Locally contingent categorization in discourse. Discourse Processes 23: 8397.
Parvaresh, V. and Tayebi, T. (2014), Vaguely speaking in Persian. Discourse Processes 51(7): 565600.
Parvaresh, V., Tavangar, M., Rasekh, A. E. and Izadi, D. (2012), About his friend, how good she is, and this and that: general extenders in native Persian and non-native English discourse. Journal of Pragmatics 44: 261–79.
Pascale, R. T. and Athos, A. G. (1981), The Art of Japanese Management. New York: Simon and Schuster.
Peirce, C. S. (1902), Vagueness. In Baldwin, M. J. (ed.), Dictionary of Philosophy and Psychology II, p. 748. London: Macmillan.
Pennebaker, J. (2011), The Secret Life of Pronouns: What Our Words Say about Us. New York: Bloomsbury Press.
Peräkylä, A. (1993), Invoking a hostile world: discussing the patient's future in AIDS counselling. Text 13(2): 291316.
Pinker, S. (2011), Language is a window into social relations. Cognitive Media. www.cognitivemedia.co.uk, retrieved 5 December 2011.
Pocheptsov, O. G. (1992), Mind your mind: or some ways of distorting facts while telling the truth. Et Cetera: A Review of General Semantics 49(4): 398404.
Pomerantz, A. (2005), Using participants’ video stimulated comments to complement analyses of interactional practices. In Molder, H. T. and Potter, J. (eds), Conversation and Cognition, pp. 93113. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Popper, K. (1966), The High Tide of Prophecy: Hegel, Marx, and the Aftermath, special issue of The Open Society and its Enemies II. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.
Popper, K. (1992), Unended Quest: An Intellectual Autobiography. London: Routledge.
Powell, M. J. (1985), Purposive vagueness: an evaluative dimension of vague quantifying expressions. Journal of Linguistics 21(1): 3150.
Pratt, M. L. (1981), The ideology of speech act theory. Centrum 1: 518.
Preacher, K. J. (2010–2015), Calculation for the chi-square test: an interactive calculation tool for chi-square tests of goodness of fit and independence (computer software). Available at http://quantpsy.org.
Preisler, B. (1986), Linguistic Sex Roles in Conversation: Social Variation in the Expression of Tentativeness in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter.
Prince, E. F., Frader, J. and Bosk, C. (1982), On hedging in physician–physician discourse. In Di Pietro, R. J. (ed.), Linguistics and the Professions, pp. 8397. Norwood (NJ): Ablex.
Quaglio, P. (2009), Television Dialogue: The Sitcom Friends vs. Natural Conversion. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Quirk, R. and Greenbaum, S. (1973), A Concise Grammar of Contemporary English. New York: Academic.
Quirk, R., Greenbaum, S., Leech, G. and Svartvik, J. (1985), A Comprehensive Grammar of the English Language. London: Longman.
Raffman, D. (2014), Unruly Words: A Study of Vague Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Rescher, N. (2008), Vagueness: a variant approach. Informal Logic 28(4): 282–94.
Roberts, C. (2003), Language acquisition or language socialization in and through discourse? Towards a redefinition of the domain of SLA. In Candlin, C. and Mercer, N. (eds), English Language Teaching in its Social Context: A Reader, pp. 108–21. London: Routledge.
Romero Trillo, J. (2002), The pragmatic fossilization of discourse markers in non-native speakers of English. Journal of Pragmatics 34(6): 769–84.
Rosch, E. (1975), Cognitive reference points. Cognitive Psychology 7: 532–47.
Rowland, T. (2007), ‘Well maybe not exactly, but it's around fifty basically?’: vague language in mathematics classrooms. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 7996. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Rue, Y. J. and Zhang, G. Q. (2008), Request Strategies: A Comparative Study in Mandarin Chinese and Korean. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Russell, B. (1923), Vagueness. Australian Journal of Philosophy and Psychology 1: 8492.
Ruzaitė, J. (2007), Vague Language in Educational Settings: Quantifiers and Approximators in British and American English. Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang.
Sabet, P. and Zhang, G. Q. (in press), Communicating through Vague Language: A Comparative Study of L1 and L2 Speakers. London: Palgrave Macmillan.
Sadock, J. M. (1977), Truth and approximations. Berkeley Linguistic Society Papers 3: 430–9.
Sassoon, G. W. (2013), Vagueness, Gradability and Typicality: The Interpretation of Adjectives and Nouns. Leiden: Brill.
Schick, L. (2014), Some people: from referential vagueness to social-moral socialization in middle school dance classes. Pragmatics and Society 5(2): 243–70.
Schiffrin, D. (1994), Approaches to Discourse. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Schönefeld, D., ed. (2011), Converging Evidence: Methodological and Theoretical Issues for Linguistic Research. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Scollon, R. and Scollon, S. (1995), Intercultural Communication: A Discourse Approach. Oxford: Blackwell.
Scott, M. (2010), WordSmith Tools, version 6.0. Liverpool: Lexical Analysis Software.
Shirato, J. and Stapleton, P. (2007), Comparing English vocabulary in a spoken learner corpus with a native speaker corpus: pedagogical implications arising from an empirical study in Japan. Language Teaching Research 11(4): 393412.
Shuy, R. W. (2014), The Language of Murder Cases. Oxford: Oxford University Press
Simpson, R. C. (2004), Formulaic expressions in academic speech. In Connor, U. and Upton, T. A. (eds), Discourse in the Professions, pp. 3764. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.
Sinclair, J. M. (1991), Corpus Concordance Collocation. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Smith, P. M. (1985), Language, the Sexes and Society. Oxford: Blackwell.
Smith, S. W. and Jucker, A. H. (2014), ‘Maybe, but probably not’: negotiating likelihood and perspective. Language and Dialogue 4(2): 284–98.
Speer, S.A. (2002), ‘Natural’ and ‘contrived’ data: a sustainable distinction? Discourse Studies 4: 511–25.
Spencer-Oatey, H. (2000), Rapport management: a framework for analysis. In Spencer-Oatey, H. (ed.), Culturally Speaking: Managing Rapport through Talk across Cultures, pp. 1146. London: Continuum.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1985/86), Loose talk. Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society New Series 86: 153–71.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1995 [1986]), Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sperber, D. and Wilson, D. (1991), Loose talk. In Davis, S. (ed.), Pragmatics: A Reader, pp. 540–9. New York: Oxford University Press.
Stenström, A. B. (1994), An Introduction to Spoken Interaction. London: Longman.
Stubbe, M. and Holmes, J. (1995), You know, eh and other ‘exasperating expressions’: an analysis of social and stylistic variation in the use of pragmatic devices in a sample of New Zealand English. Language and Communication 15(1): 6388.
Stubbs, M. (1986a), A matter of prolonged fieldwork: notes towards a modal grammar of English. Applied Linguistics 7(1): 125.
Stubbs, M. (1986b), Educational Linguistics. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Stubbs, M. (1996), Text and Corpus Analysis. Oxford: Blackwell.
Sunderland, J. (2004), Gendered Discourses. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
Swales, M. J. (1990), Genre Analysis: English in Academic and Research Settings. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tannen, D. (1989), Talking Voices. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Tannen, D. (1990), You Just Don't Understand: Women and Men in Conversation. New York: William Morrow.
Tannen, D. (1996), That's Not What I Meant. London: Virago Press.
Tárnyiková, J. (2009), Vague reference to notional categories (English–Czech interface). Philologica: Anglica III Linguistica 99: 115–32.
Tausczik, Y. R. and Pennebaker, J. W. (2010), The psychological meaning of words: LIWC and computerized text analysis methods. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 29(1): 2454.
Terraschke, A. and Holmes, J. (2007), ‘Und tralala’: vagueness and general extenders in German and New Zealand English. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 198220. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Thomas, J. (1995), Meaning in Interaction: An Introduction to Pragmatics. London: Longman.
Tong, R. M., Nguyen, H. T., Yager, R. R. and Ovchinnikov, S., eds (1987), Fuzzy Sets and Applications: Selected Papers by Lotfi A. Zadeh. New York: Wiley.
Trappes-Lomax, H. (2007), Vague language as a means of self-protective avoidance: tension management in conference talks. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 117–37. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Trickett, L. (2012), ‘I get to fly home business class’, retrieved from http://media.smh.com.au/sport (29 July 2012).
Ullmann, S. (1962), Semantics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Van Deemter, K. (2010), Not Exactly: In Praise of Vagueness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Vygotsky, L. S. (1978), Mind in Society. Cambridge (MA): Harvard University Press.
Wachtel, T. (1980), Pragmatic approximations. Journal of Pragmatics 4(3): 201–11.
Wachtel, T. (1981), Distinguishing between approximations. Journal of Pragmatics 5(4): 311–22.
Ward, G. and Birner, B. (1992), The semantics and pragmatics of ‘and everything’. Journal of Pragmatics 19(3): 205–14.
Wardhaugh, R. (1985), How Conversation Works. Oxford: Basil Blackwell.
Wardhaugh, R. (1993), Investigating Language: Central Problems in Linguistics. Oxford: Blackwell.
Warren, M. (2007), {/〔Oh〕Not a < ^ Lot >}: discourse intonation and vague language. In Cutting, J. (ed.), Vague Language Explored, pp. 182–97. Basingstoke (UK): Palgrave Macmillan.
Widdowson, H. G. (1984), Reference and representation as modes of meaning. In Widdowson, H. G. (ed.), Explorations in Applied Linguistics 2 (Chapter 11). Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Wierzbicka, A. (1986), Precision in vagueness: the semantics of English ‘approximatives’. Journal of Pragmatics 10(5): 597613.
Williamson, T. (1994a), Vagueness. In Asher, R. and Simpson, S. (eds), The Encyclopedia of Language and Linguistics, pp. 4869–71. Oxford: Pergamon Press.
Williamson, T. (1994b), Vagueness. London: Routledge.
Wilson, J. (1990), Politically Speaking: The Pragmatic Analysis of Political Language. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wilson, D. and Sperber, D. (2012), Meaning and Relevance. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Wittgenstein, L. (1953), Philosophical Investigations. Oxford: Blackwell.
Wodak, R. (1996), Disorders of Discourse. London: Longman.
Wright, J. W. and Hosman, L. A. (1983), Language style and sex bias in the courtroom: the effects of male and female use of hedges and intensifiers on impression formation. Southern Speech Communication Journal 48:137–52.
Wu, T. P. (1999), Mohu Yuyanxue (in Chinese) [Fuzzy Linguistics]. Shanghai: Shanghai Foreign Language Education Press.
Yule, G. (1996), Pragmatics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Zadeh, L. A. (1965), Fuzzy sets. Information and Control 8(3): 338–53.
Zhang, G. Q. (1996), The semantics of fuzzy quantifiers. PhD thesis, The University of Edinburgh.
Zhang, G. Q. (1998), Fuzziness-vagueness-generality-ambiguity. Journal of Pragmatics 29(1): 1331.
Zhang, G. Q. (2004), Mohu Yuyixue (in Chinese) [Fuzzy Semantics], 2nd edition. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.
Zhang, G. Q. (2005), Fuzziness and relevance theory. Waiguo Yuyan Wenxue [Foreign Language and Literature Studies] 22(2): 7384.
Zhang, G. Q. (2011), Elasticity of vague language. Intercultural Pragmatics 8(4): 571–99.
Zhang, G. Q. (2013), The impact of touchy topics on vague language use. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 23(1): 87118.
Zhang, G. Q. (2014), The elasticity of I think: stretching its pragmatic functions. Intercultural Pragmatics 11(2): 225–57.
Zhang, G. Q. and Feng, H. B. (2013), Hanyu zhong de mohu yuyan he huati de minganxing (in Chinese) [The sensitivity of conversational topics and vague language in Mandarin Chinese]. Dangdai Yuyanxue [Contemporary Linguistics] 15(1): 4561.
Zhang, G. Q. and Sabet, P. (in press), Elastic ‘I think’: stretching over L1 and L2. Applied Linguistics, advance access published 1 July 2014, doi:10.1093/applin/amu020
Zhang, Y. P. and Li, J. L. (1999), Culture and Communication. Beijing: China Renmin University Publishing House.
Zhao, X. H. and Zhang, G. Q. (2012), Negotiating with Vague Language: A Chinese Perspective. Beijing: China Social Sciences Press.

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.