Vague Language in L2 Corpora of Russian

Abstract

Vague language has been explored in a variety of languages, including Russian. There is also a growing body of research into vague language used by L2 speakers, predominantly of English. Vague language of Russian L2 learners has not yet been addressed.

The present study focuses on the use of vague language by Italian-speaking learners of Russian based on the data of 2 learner corpora. It deals with main categories of vague language: vague nouns (вещь ‘thing’), approximators (около десяти ‘around ten’), and general extenders (и так далее ‘and so on’). The aim of the study is to identify how extensively and in what contexts Italian learners of Russian resort to vague language and to compare the findings to the use of vague language by native speakers and learners with a different linguistic background (English L1).