A Pragmatic Analysis of Vague Language in the News Articles on the Iraqi Security Crisis

Abstract

There is a well-known belief among linguists and discourse analysts saying that vague language is one of the common features of political language. In order for the linguists to include vague language within the domain of linguistic analysis, they started formulating vagueness within the principles of the pragmalinguistic theory.  However, the pragmatic perspective had not been paid much attention yet. With the accelerated events in the Middle East, the best way to get information is to appreciate some news items because they are objective facts that are accessible and easy to comprehend for everybody (Pan, 2012, p. 2530). Iraq has witnessed many periods of serious escalation among which is the one started in April 2014 in which, the ISIS influence started expanding suddenly and rapidly causing infrastructure damage and causalities. The present paper aims at investigating vague expressions in news articles on the security situation in Iraq in the period mentioned above by means of Grice’s cooperative principle to find out the purposes vague language serves and its effects on these news articles.