Vague expression of quality and quantity

Precision in earlier centuries was treated as a major principle in the academic world;

however, the traditional perception has been challenged and re-evaluated. There has been a substantial amount of researches discussing about the imprecision in terms of quality and

quantity in different disciplines (Prince et al. 1982, Kennedy 1987, Bonanno 1994, Channell 1990, 2004, Ruzaite 2004, Mauranen 2004, Miskovic-Lukovic 2009). Linguistic expressions conveying the notion of imprecision are mostly attributed to Price et al.’s (1982)

“approximators” category of hedges, such as almost, somewhat, sort of, about, approximately, and essentially. In Prince et al.’s physician- physician discourse,

“approximators” occur “when a speaker is attempting to correlate an actual situation with some prototypical, goal-relevant situation” (p. 88), and they are used to introduce fuzziness within the proposition that the speaker utters. Uncertainty is concluded to be the underlying cause of the application of “approximators” for those medical specialists. Channell (1990) examines precise and vague quantities in three writings on economics, and she interviewed two of the three authors to elicit comments on their choices of particular words and

expressions. The results show that the choice of vague versus precise rests on writers’

perceptions of the purposes of their writing.

For example, in the sentence (42) below:

(42) He’s producing about ten pages a week and they’re all getting published.

Channell (1990: 98)

An interval of something like 8 to 12 may be understood as the perceived length of the interval cannot be determined precisely in any given case. However, according to Channell, the general length is influenced by a set of contextual and situational factors, such as the size of the given number, how many significant figures it contains, purpose of the vague, type of item being quantified, and situation of use. In the economic written texts, round numbers¹⁰ and nonunmerical quantifiers (e.g. low, high, extensive) are favored for the writer to avoid

10  Round numbers are numbers which are structuring points of a number system. E.g. in the base 10 system used in the UK, 5, 10, 20, 30, 100 etc.. (Channell 1994: 220) A round number may be perceived as an approximation, as in the wedding cost £800, whereas a nonround number cannot be, as in the wedding cost

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giving exact information, which is uncertain for the writer or it is unnecessary to give. In her book of vagueness, Channell (1994) provides a thorough description of various ways of approximating quantities in English through reference to copious examples of language in use, which include examples of vague additives, i.e., approximators (e.g. about, around, approximately), downtoners (e.g. a bit of ), and vague category identifiers (e.g. or something like that, and stuff, or whatever), and examples of lexical vagueness, i.e., vague quantifying expressions (e.g. many, some, few), vague adverbs of frequency (e.g. sometimes, usually), and placeholder words (e.g. thingy, whatsisname¹¹). It is argued that “vagueness in

communication is part of our taken-for-granted world, and that normally we do not notice it unless it appears inappropriate” (p. 4). Those vague quantifiers enable a speaker to talk about matters he/she is not very knowledgeable about or lack of the necessary vocabulary. The vague quantifiers are also utilized as a defensive tactic when the speaker does not want to commit him/herself to the proposition, as in the following example:

(43) B: Could you give me some idea of how long it would take?

C: Well the quote might be done within three or four days but the job won’t be done for at least five weeks. (Channell 1994: 178)

Channell (1990, 1994) proposes that Gricean maxims (1975, 1981) of Quality and Quantity are particularly relevant in the description and explanation of vague language use. On the one hand, vague language may be used to follow the maxims, and on the other hand, vague

language is often employed while one of the maxims is violated. For instance, someone might reply “around six o’clock” as being asked what time he/she would be home from work since the workload and traffic cannot be genuinely anticipated. In this case, the speaker follows the maxim of Quality by being informative, but not overinformative. As Grice (1975) observes,

11  Whatsisname is probably derived from what’s his name, what’s its name, or what’s her name. (Channell 1994: 160)

speakers often break rather than follow one or more maxims. When the violations occur, special effects are created for hearers, which are called “implicatures” (p. 43). The following example illustrates a violation of Quantity:

(44) [paper reporting informant work at a linguistics conference]

We’ve got about five or six of them but I’m only going to talk about three of them today. (Channell 1994: 33)

In this case, the speaker (a linguist engages in phonetics research) must know how many informants he has; therefore, the adherence of the maxim of Quantity is expected. However, the speaker chooses not to give the exact number. Channell (as a hearer in his audience) assumes that he must have intended something else, which is that the total amount of informants is not important and the focus is the three people the speaker is going to talk about. Hyland (1998) argues that writers depend more on context than on linguistic form while conveying meanings; therefore, Grice’s implicatures serve as an important way to draw on and exploit knowledge shared with readers. The maxim of Quality, “Do not say what you believe to be false” and “Do not say that for which you lack sufficient evidence” (Grice 1975:

46) fit the requirements of honesty and truthfulness in scientific statements, which may explain the employment of some hedged expressions. The high frequency of approximations found in Hyland’s (1998)’s corpus can be explained by reference to the maxim of Quality since writers can “manipulate the quantity maxim to express the tentativeness of their beliefs”

(p. 41):

(45) These data suggest that the ACC synthase isoenzyme expressed in E. coli behaves more or less like the native ACC synthase enzyme(s) of ripe tomato fruit in its response to substrate inactivation. (Hyland 1998: 42)

With the hedging adverb, more or less, the writer of (45) withholds full commitment to the proposition expressed. Hyland points out that a great amount of hedges in science involves

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the manipulation of precision in quantification, and the most frequently employed

expressions are about, approximately, some, and around. Numerical approximations often employ ‘degree of precision’ adverbs (p. 140), which enables writers to specify the accuracy with an acceptable degree of imprecision. In some cases, these adverbs are used to

foreground more important quantities. The writers also utilize imprecision as a rhetorical means to strengthen their arguments, in that comparative phrases, such as at least, less than, and more than are commonly used, as in (46)

(46) The concentration of asparagine in the blade of infected plants was more than four times that in uninfected plants at the high rate of KNO3 fertilisation and nearly twice as great as the high rate of (NH4)2SO4.

A wide range of adverbial forms are employed by the scientific writers. Hyland (1998) asserts that adverbs are predominately utilized as popular epistemic devices due to “their sentential mobility” and “semantic diversity” (p. 141). The writers often use epistemic adjectives to “‘objectify’ the modality and obscure the source of the judgment through impersonal expressions,” while nominalization is used to “present the writer’s belief as an abstraction” (p. 141).

In Chinese, expressions used to denote the imprecise quality and quantity are normally realized under various grammatical categories which convey indefinite degree, frequency, and approximation. These grammatical categories comprise adverbs (e.g. you(yi)dian 有(一) 些 ‘a bit’, (da)duo (大)多 ‘mostly’, (da)yue (大)約 ‘approximately’), adjectives (e.g.

mouzhongchengdude 某種程度的 ‘a certain degree of’, buda 不大 ‘not big’, dabufen(de) 大部份(的) ‘most of’, and nouns (e.g yier 一二 ‘a little’, yu 餘 ‘more than’, sheme 什麼

‘what’).

In Chen’s (2008) conversation data, the adverbs of degree are used to “weaken the force of a statement by minimizing the extent of the effect conveyed by a proposition” (p.

60), as in (47), while in Lo’s (2010) academic written texts, the adverbs of indefinite degree

“enable writers to withdraw their full commitment to the precise degree of the quality or quantity” (p. 97), as in (48).

(47) …你對現在的男女的愛情觀呢，似乎是有一點兒悲感呢。

‘You seem to take a pessimistic stance on the views of men and women nowadays on love.’ (Chen 2008: 61)

(48) …顯示估計的 225 個利率期限結構中，線性估計法的 Calibration 效果皆比

非線性估計法佳，這倒是比較與直覺不符。

‘…This shows that among the 225 term structures, the effects of Calibration in linear optimization method are all better than those in nonlinear optimization method. This is relatively not consistent with our intuition.” (Lo 2010: 99-100)

In (47), the degree adverb youyidian 有一點 means ‘a little’, which is used by the speaker to reduce the intensity of the adjective beigan 悲感 ‘pessimistic’. The adverb bijiao 比較

‘relatively’ in (48) is used to modify the author’s judgment to lower the degree of the

following predicate. Negative degree adverbs (e.g. butai 不太 ‘not very’, buda 不大 ‘not very’, buyi 不易 ‘not easy’) are observed in both Chinese spoken and written copra to denote the notion of indeterminacy in precision. Those negative expressions are utilized to lower the force of their following predicates and simultaneously help the speakers/writers avoid making full commitment to the propositions. In Lo’s academic corpus, negative degree adverbs occupy a significant proportion of all adverbs of indefinite degree, around 20% in Business, 22% in Biology, and 27% in History & Literature. Adverbs of frequency are utilized to indicate the indefinite frequency of events. In conversation, speakers sometimes prefer to use adverbs of frequency instead of providing an exact number, which is attributed to two purposes. First, adverbs of frequency reduce the speaker’s commitment to the numeral figures because sometimes the precise number may not be obtained. Second, the situation described by the utterance occurs only occasionally. That is, when the situation changes, the

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numeral figures may not apply. By using adverbs of frequency, such as you(de/xie)shi(hou) 有(的/些)時(候) ‘sometimes’, changchang 常常 ‘often’, speakers can avoid taking full responsibility for their utterances. In Chinese academic writing, the most frequently employed adverbs of indefinite frequency are those denote the sense of higher frequency, such as (da)duo (大)多 ‘mostly’, wangwang 往往 ‘frequently’, tongzhang 通常 ‘usually’.

As well as adverbs of higher degree, adverbs of higher frequency are utilized frequently when the authors intend to focus the readers’ attention to the information that best support their argument or claims, whereas adverbs of lower frequency are used when authors’ subjective speculation are expressed or when previous literature is not supportive enough. Adverbs of approximation are often employed by speakers to hedge numerical expressions or quantities when the precise information is unnecessary or unavailable. The imprecise expressions protect speakers from making a false statement and mitigate their commitment to the truth value of utterances. For example:

(49) 因為巧克力裡面，它的成分其實，百分之七十左右，是所謂的碳水化合

物。

‘The so-called carbohydrate accounts for about seventy percent of the ingredients of chocolate.’ (Chen 2008: 63-64)

The adverb of approximation zuoyou 左右 ‘about’ in (49) is used with the numerical expression to indicate that the exact figure is uncertain but close to seventy percent. The speaker shows her lack of full commitment to the proposition and meanwhile protects herself from being accused of making a false statement. In academic writing, adverbs of

approximation are not only used to modify quantity but also quality. In Biology, adverbs of approximation are mainly used to modify numerical figures. In the fields of Business and History & Literature, adverbs of approximations (e.g. ji(hu) 幾乎 ‘almost’, dazhi(shang) 大 致(上) ‘approximately’, and zhengtieryan 整體而言 ‘overall’) are exploited to hedge

quality, as in the following example extracted from business field:

(50) 因此，消費者理想主義特性會與道德決策有關在本研究大致獲得驗證。

‘Therefore, the hypothesis that the idealism of moral philosophy is related to ethical decision-making is approximately proved in this study.’ (Lo 2010: 110)

The higher degree of approximator dazhishang 大致上 ‘approximately’ in (50) draw readers’ attention to the findings that best support the author’s argument.