Vague Language and Interpersonal Communication: An Analysis of Adolescent Intercultural Conversation

This paper was concerned with the analysis of the spoken language of teenagers, taken from a newly developed specialized corpus, the British and Taiwanese Teenage Intercultural Communication Corpus (BATTICC). More specifically, the study employed a discourse analytical approach to examine vague language in an intercultural context among a group of British and Taiwanese adolescents, paying particular attention to the three categories of vague expressions: (a) vague categories, (b) approximations and (c) hedging. Initial quantitative analysis was employed to inform further qualitative analysis to identify the pragmatic functions of each type of vague langue. The different uses of vague expressions between Taiwanese and British participants were also presented in detail. The research findings demonstrated the pedagogical merit of the analyses of naturally-occurring discourse, and thus help in the design of English courses for adolescent intercultural interaction.