Abstract
Carter and McCarthy (2006, p. 202) assert that VL expressions are a strong indication of an assumed shared knowledge and that they mark in-group membership, in so far as the referents of vague expressions can be assumed to be known by the listener. This is consistent with Cutting (2000), who illustrates how discourse communities use VL as a marker of in-group membership. It is this interactive aspect of VL that we will focus on in this chapter. We examine one particular manifestation of vagueness: the creation of vague category markers (hereafter VCMs), such as ‘university courses and that sort of thing’; ‘I’ve got to wash my hair and everything’, where speakers refer obliquely to other members of categories which they assume their listeners will be able to ‘fill in’. In extract (1) from an everyday conversation at a family dinner table (taken from the Limerick Corpus of Irish English, hereafter LCIE), where the participants are talking about someone who has taken a job at a local fast-food restaurant, one of the speakers throws out an ad hoc category (Barsalou 1983, 1987):
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(1)
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Speaker 1: And what’s he going to be doing in there?
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Speaker 2: I think they’re training him as a trainee manager.
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Speaker 3: You mean he’s frying chips. Basically. <laughs>
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Speaker 1: Frying chips?
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Speaker 2: He says ‘I’m going to do everything. Fry chips and wait tables and stuff’.
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Speaker 1: … there’s no way he’ll be able for that like <laughs>
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© 2007 Jane Evison, Michael McCarthy, Anne O’Keeffe
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Evison, J., McCarthy, M., O’Keeffe, A. (2007). ‘Looking Out for Love and All the Rest of It’: Vague Category Markers as Shared Social Space. In: Cutting, J. (eds) Vague Language Explored. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627420_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627420_8
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