On Vague Reference in College English

Abstract

We often come across examples of vague reference in English learning, especially college English learning. On entering college, students tend to feel at a loss since their vocabulary is required to be enlarged rapidly and a variety of reference patterns are included in their learning materials which mostly come from American and European original works. Trying to break away from those traditional researches, this paper proposes to generalize the concept of reference from the perspective of pragmatic functions and analyzes a variety of vague reference phenomena.