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Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest: Linguistic and pragmatic approaches
Edited by Ilaria Fiorentini and Chiara Zanchi
[Pragmatics & Beyond New Series 347] 2024
► pp. 29–50

Chapter 3
The role of ambiguity in intentional vagueness

| University of Salerno
In order to study the relationship between ambiguity and vagueness, it is necessary to distinguish Systemic Vagueness (SV), which is a property of any linguistic codes, from Intentional Vagueness (IntV), which emerges in messages produced by speakers in response to specific communicative needs. In fact, while ambiguity is one of the possible manifestations of SV, the expression of IntV tends to avoid ambiguous elements. This is confirmed empirically by an analysis carried out on Italian and German spoken corpora to investigate whether and how many ambiguous elements were used in Vagueness Expressions (VEs), which shows how the presence of ambiguous terms in VEs is exiguous in both languages. The almost complete absence of ambiguity and intentional vagueness co-occurring in this research seems to confirm the different nature and function of the two phenomena.
Keywords: systemic vagueness, intentional vagueness, ambiguity, spoken Italian, spoken German
Article outline
  • 1.Introduction
  • 2.Systemic vagueness
  • 3.Systemic vagueness and ambiguity
  • 4.Intentional vagueness
  • 5.Looking for ambiguity in vagueness expressions: A corpus-based analysis
  • 6.Conclusive remarks
  • Acknowledgements
  • Notes
  • References
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