Language and the Socio-Cultural Worlds of Those Who Use it: A Case of Vague Expressions

The present study is an attempt to investigate the use ofvague expressions by intermediate EFL learners. Morespecifically, the current study focuses on the structures andfunctions of one of the most common categories of vaguelanguage, i.e. general extenders. The data include a 22-hourcorpus of English-as-a-foreign-language conversations. Acomparison is also made between this corpus and a 20-hourcorpus of Persian conversations. The analyses show that thefirst language influences not only the structure but also theposition of EFL general extenders. Additionally, the presentstudy shows that some of the functions fulfilled by Persiangeneral extenders can be transferred to EFL discourse. Thecurrent study can be interpreted as evidence suggesting thatthere is a complex intertwining between universal andlanguage-specific features at least when one comparesgeneral extenders across languages.