Abstract

    Vagueness, the intrinsic attribute of news language, plays an vital role in news reporting. This paper ventures to analyze pragmatic vagueness that occurs within English news reporting. The author mainly adopts Grice’s cooperative principle to make an analysis of vagueness in news reporting, with several collected news reports from some authoritative media as examples. The analysis has summed up that pragmatic vagueness demonstrates a number of functions in successful news reporting, including improving the reliability and validity, meeting the reading habits of the audience, protecting the reporter from responsibility, minimizing the negative effect. Therefore, the author believes that pragmatic vagueness is so indispensable for English news reporting that it should be paid great attention to.

Key Words: pragmatic vagueness  English news reporting  cooperative principle pragmatic function

摘  要

    模糊语，作为新闻语言的特有的属性，在新闻报道中扮演了必不可少的角色。本文主要运用格莱斯的合作原则来分析语用模糊在英语新闻语言中的应用，通过从当今权威的英美报纸上收集的大量实例，分析新闻报道中存在的不同的模糊表达法。在此基础上，本文进一步分析了语用模糊对于一个成功的英语新闻报道的作用，概括出模糊语在新闻报道中的语用功能：提高新闻报道内容的可靠性和灵活性、合乎读者的阅读习惯、保护新闻报道者的自身利益、以及最小化新闻有时带来的负面影响。因此作者认为，语用模糊对于英语新闻语言来说是不可或缺的，值得高度关注。

关键词：语用模糊 新闻语言 合作原则 语用功能

1 Introduction
In an age of globalization, the communications and exchanges within different countries are more prevalent and prosperous than ever before. On this condition, people’s utterance and their behavior have draw more and more attention from scholars concerned. There are plenty of speaking skills to make a person’s utterance and performance more natural and polite, among which vagueness in language has been frequently used, especially in English news reporting.
    As a medium of mass communication, news language disseminates news information and expresses news facts. Therefore, how to accurately use news language is of great significance. The truthfulness of news, to a great extent, depends on its accurate language, which is the soul of a successful news reporting. Joseph Pulitzer holds the opinion that, accuracy on the newspaper is as important as chastity of women.