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The present study sets out to examine whether and how task structure affects the number and type of vague expressions used by a group of higher intermediate EFL learners. The participants were 50 Iranian EFL learners from 6 intact classes, all native speakers of Persian with limited opportunity to communicate with native speakers of English, and no experience in English-speaking countries. To elicit data, two picture description tasks were used. These picture-stories possessed the defining characteristics of structured and unstructured narrative tasks, respectively. Results revealed that (a) unstructured tasks were associated with the production of significantly more vague expressions and (b) the most notable differences between performances on the two task types concerned "vague nouns", "vague quantifiers", "vague deintensifiers" and "vague subjectivisers". The results of the study have implications for both teachers and teacher educators in that they may help identify the kinds of tasks which induce language learners to use vague expressions more frequently.

The present study sets out to investigate the structures and functions of vague expressions in Persian. The data under scrutiny include a 15-hour corpus of informal conversations. The corpus reveals some unique vague expressions including "rhyming words," "replacing expressions," and "the affective completer." Furthermore, a classificatory model is proposed that can be used to analyze vague expressions according to moment-by-moment communicative needs. The model divides the functions fulfilled by vague expressions into cooperative and noncooperative ones. Cooperative functions are those functions that serve to provide the hearer with enough information, however vague it is. Noncooperative functions are, on the other hand, those functions that show the speaker's unwillingness to provide the hearer with enough information. Cooperative functions are further divided into stance-oriented and engagement-oriented ones. While stance-oriented functions are motivated by the speaker's own judgments, engagement-oriented ones reveal a more social orientation.

Many researchers in impoliteness studies have set themselves the task of determining, amongst other things, (i) what linguistic or non-linguistic phenomena can cause offence, and (ii) why people take offence. However, the reality of interaction clearly shows that, on many occasions, there appears to be a marked dissonance between the speaker and hearer in their evaluations of offensive language, even in locally situated interaction. More research is therefore needed to account for and explain why and how the hearer assigns a particularly offensive meaning to an utterance during the course of an interaction. With this aim, and by drawing on insight from what is referred to as "radical contextualism", in this study we discuss the possibility of looking at how interactants can arrive at their own (subjective) evaluations of impoliteness in ways that do not match up with the alleged intentions of the so-called offender. Drawing on a number of exchanges that involve such instances of taking offence, we will argue that the taking of offence should best be viewed as a process over which the hearer has a more active control. Accordingly, the paper contributes to current attempts at explaining the variability involved in the taking of offence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article focuses on the aim of this Special Issue is to present a variety of analytical concepts and methodologies by which politeness and impoliteness can be examined innovatively, and which differ from those used in current mainstream politeness research. It mentions that the politeness researchers have, drawn on research from outside the realm of linguistic pragmatics, including sociolinguistics, interaction studies, critical discourse analysis and so on.