Vagueness expressions in Italian, Spanish and English task-oriented dialogues

Resumen

In this article, we present a corpus-based analysis on the use of Vagueness Expressions (VEs) in Italian, Spanish and English in Task-oriented Dialogues. Following the distinction among informational, relational and discourse vagueness (Voghera 2012), we compare the width of the functional space of the most frequent VEs. In particular we investigate whether and to what extent the VEs cover all the types of vagueness in the three languages. Quantitative and qualitative analysis brings evidence about a high convergence in the vagueness functions expressed by the VEs of the three languages.