Abstract:

Vagueness is also an attribute of natural language, and a common linguistic phenomenon. So far, the research on the vague language has been extended into many areas. News reporting as a media plays an increasingly important role in the information age, whose primary requirement is accuracy. However, in reality vague language does exist in news report widely. Could it be said that this phenomenon is a paradox? On the basis of many researchers’ achievements, this paper first introduces the definition of vague language and studies the reasons of its appearance. And then it sums up the characteristics of news reporting and analyzes the function of vague language in English news based on collection of authoritative English news . It is hoped that readers could better understand that vagueness is a language-use strategy in communication and an effective way of expressing in news reporting.

Key words: vague language; English news report; adaption theory

摘要：

模糊性也是自然语言一种属性，是普遍存在的语言现象。到目前为止,对于模糊语言的研究己经扩展到了很多领域。新闻报道作为一种传播媒介,在我们所处的信息时代起着日益重要的作用,其首要要求便是准确性，然而现实中模糊语言在新闻报道中却普遍存在.这种现象能被说成是一种悖论吗？在许多研究人员成就的基础上，本文首先介绍模糊语言的定义并总结其产生的原因。文章总结了新闻报道的特点，并在收集权威英语新闻语料的基础上，对英语新闻报道中的模糊语进行分析与研究。希望读者能更好地理解模糊性是语言使用的策略，沟通和表达新闻报道的有效途径。

关键词：模糊语言；英语新闻报道；顺应理论

1. Introduction
As a language phenomenon vagueness was once ignored by scholars and regarded as a fault of language which was annoying and should be avoided as far as possible. The situation did not change much until the beginning of the 20th century. The famous English scholar B. Russell (1923) proposed the vagueness phenomenon in his paper Vagueness. Later, American well-known professor L.A.Zadeh (1965) presented the fuzzy set theory and provided the fundamental ground of fuzziness study. He has contributed a lot to the birth of fuzzy linguistics as a scientific subject. From then on, people began to pay more attention to the fuzziness study and, accordingly, fuzzy linguistics developed very rapidly.