Abstract
Much of everyday language is vague, even in situations where vagueness could have been avoided (i.e., where vagueness is used ‘strategically’). Yet the benefits of vagueness for hearers and readers are proving to be elusive. We discuss a range of earlier controlled experiments with human participants, and we report on a new series of experiments that we ourselves have conducted in recent years. These experiments, which focus on vague expressions that are part of referential noun phrases, aim to separate the utility of vagueness (as defined by the existence of borderline cases) from the utility of other factors that tend to co-occur with vagueness. After presenting the evidence, we argue that it supports a view where the benefits that vague terms exert are due to other influences, and not to vagueness itself.
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Notes
- 1.
Other metrics could have been chosen, such as hearers’ ability to remember information, for example, or error rates. Although error rates play a minor role in the present paper, for reasons that will become clear, we focus on response times in particular.
- 2.
Such a stimulus is referred to hereafter as consisting of a set of dot arrays The number of dots in an array is referred to as its cardinality. The physical arrangement of dots in each array is irregular.
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Green, M.J., van Deemter, K. (2019). The Elusive Benefits of Vagueness: Evidence from Experiments. In: Dietz, R. (eds) Vagueness and Rationality in Language Use and Cognition. Language, Cognition, and Mind, vol 5. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15931-3_5
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