Vague Language Explored

Part I. Introduction

1. Introduction to Vague Language Explored

Joan Cutting

Part II. Vagueness and Genre

2. ‘This We Have Done’: The Vagueness of Poetry and Public Relations
Guy Cook

3. ‘About Twelve Thousand or So’: Vagueness in North American and UK Offices
Almut Koester

4. Caught Between Professional Requirements and Interpersonal Needs: Vague Language in Healthcare Contexts
Svenja Adolphs, Sarah Atkins, Kevin Harvey

5. ‘Well Maybe Not Exactly, but It’s Around Fifty Basically?’: Vague Language in Mathematics Classrooms
Tim Rowland

6. ‘I Think He Was Kind of Shouting or Something’: Uses and Abuses of Vagueness in the British Courtroom
Janet Cotterill

Part III. Psychology of Vagueness

7. Vague Language as a Means of Self-Protective Avoidance: Tension Management in Conference Talks
Hugh Trappes-Lomax

8. ‘Looking Out for Love and All the Rest of It’: Vague Category Markers as Shared Social Space
Jane Evison, Michael McCarthy, Anne O’Keeffe

Part IV. Cross-Cultural Vagueness

9. The Use of Vague Language Across Spoken Genres in an Intercultural Hong Kong Corpus
Winnie Cheng

10. { / [ Oh ] Not a < ^ Lot > }: Discourse Intonation and Vague Language
Martin Warren

11. ‘Und Tralala’: Vagueness and General Extenders in German and New Zealand English
Agnes Terraschke, Janet Holmes

Part V. Conclusion

12. ‘Doing More Stuff — Where’s It Going?’: Exploring Vague Language Further
Joan Cutting

Avainsanat: Linguistics, Sociolinguistics, Psycholinguistics