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

Abstract

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.

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“…What speakers usually say is one thing while its implication is either different or it can be interpreted in other ways. The concept of "implicature" was developed to make a clear distinction between the actual utterance and the intended message of the utterance (Khalil, 2017).Moreover, he also proposes the cooperative principle which is essentially the theory that to have a better communication, a speaker must adhere to certain rules which he calls maxims. To further illustrate the cooperative principle, Grice (1975) puts forward four categories of maxims:…”

“…The reason being the words could have varying meanings to various readers or listeners and; 3) Vague implication is information that delivers a precise impression. This is commonly misunderstood by readers and listeners because information has a hard time catering to the understanding of the collective (Khalil, 2017).…”

“…Thus, the vague implication is not unclear due to a lack of information or a lack of clarity but because the context leaves room for misinterpretation, elicits questions for clarification, or even confusion over what the implicature really means (Gribanova & Gaidukova, 2019). For example, "American aircraft struck five targets within five hours Sunday, including armed vehicles and a mortar position, U.S. Central Command said," (From a news article on the Iraqi security crisis, as cited in Khalil, 2017). The phrases five targets and five hours Sunday still elicits questions to clarify the information.…”

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“…However, in some cases, it does not show the exact meaning because of the situation. Sometimes, reporters are unable to get all the facts immediately for one or another reason (Khalil, 2017), but they should report it quickly and with trust. Therefore, to protect them from making wrong statements, they often use vague language.…”

“…The other research study by from Khalil (2017), entitled ''A Pragmatic Analysis of Vague Language in the News Articles on the Iraqi Security Crisis, investigates and pragmatically analyses the vague language in news articles on the Iraqi security crisis in the period after April 2014 when ISIS conquered important Iraqi cities. Theory of Grice's cooperative principle was used to uncover the purposes vague language serves and its effects on news articles.…”