3.1 Reasons for the Existence of Vagueness in Business Negotiations9

3.2  Characteristics of Vague Language in Business Negotiations9

3.3 Methods to Realize Vagueness in Business Negotiations 10

4  Pragmatic Functions of Vagueness in Business Negotiations10

4.1  Creating Harmonious Atmosphere 10

4.2  Being Flexible and Tactful 11

4.3  Avoiding or Shifting Responsibility 13

4.4  Being Self-protecting 13

4.5  Achieving Politeness15

Conclusions16

Acknowledgements17

Bibliography18

1 Introduction

Vagueness, as an intrinsic feature of the language, has been paid more and more attention by the learners. The vagueness refers to the form of language whose concepts of linguistic expressions do not have sharply defined boundaries, or the natural language that has vagueness as its inherent property. Many scholars had done relevant researches before. However, there are less done deeply and systematically from the value and positive pragmatic functions of vagueness in the business negotiations. By collecting a great deal of vagueness in business negotiations and describing the stylistic features of it, the thesis is trying to probe into the pragmatic functions of vagueness in business negotiations.

1.1 Overview

Many people hold that the more exact and clear the language is, the better the communication goes. While Since L. A. Zadeh published his paper “Fuzzy sets” in 1965, many systematic descriptive researches on vagueness have been done, and the theory of fuzzy sets has advanced in variety of ways. It combines with many other disciplines, such as mathematics, linguistics, psychology, logic, etc. However, little research has been conducted to relate vagueness to the language used in business negotiations. Hence, the author makes this research in an effort to explore the pragmatic significance of vagueness employed in business negotiations to track down the proper application of vagueness and better ways to achieve ideal results in negotiation.

1.2 Significance of the Study

With the increasing use of vagueness in business negotiations, it is important to study it further. 

Firstly, vagueness is commonly employed in business negotiations; it has aroused more and more attention of scholars. Vagueness is a common phenomenon in human language and vague linguistic has become an important discipline which offers a special perspective to view language. In China, vagueness as an important part of linguistic study has been extensively discussed for many years. Though vagueness in business negotiations is a common phenomenon, the study of vagueness seldom associates with business negotiations. The author tries to prove the factual existence of vagueness in business negotiations. And the study finds that proper use of linguistic vagueness can make the business negotiations go successfully.

Secondly, the study of vagueness and business negotiations may be of practical importance. It aims to explore the pragmatic application of vagueness in business negotiations and it is hoped that the study can benefit the interested learners as well as negotiators respectively in how to efficiently comprehend vagueness and how to properly take good advantage of it in business negotiations. This would enable the negotiators to understand the real intention of using vagueness in negotiation, make right judgment on their own superior and inferior situations, and work out more suitable and effective strategies in order to achieve commercial purposes ideally.

Due to the above reasons, the present research is to carry out a relatively thorough and systematic survey of the factual use of vagueness in business negotiations. It is intended to probe into the pragmatic functions of vagueness in business negotiations.来~自^751论+文.网www.751com.cn/

2 Literature Review