Imprecise language, informal

spoken language A spoken language is a language produced by articulate sounds or (depending on one's definition) manual gestures, as opposed to a written language. An oral language or vocal language is a language produced with the vocal tract in contrast with a si ...

, or everyday language is less precise than any more formal or academic languages. Language might be said to be imprecise because it exhibits one or more of the following features: *

ambiguity Ambiguity is the type of meaning in which a phrase, statement or resolution is not explicitly defined, making several interpretations plausible. A common aspect of ambiguity is uncertainty. It is thus an attribute of any idea or statement ...

– when a word or phrase pertains to its having more than one meaning in the language to which the word belongs. *

vagueness In linguistics and philosophy, a vague predicate is one which gives rise to borderline cases. For example, the English adjective "tall" is vague since it is not clearly true or false for someone of middling height. By contrast, the word "prime" is ...

– when borderline cases interfere with an interpretation. *

equivocation In logic, equivocation ("calling two different things by the same name") is an informal fallacy resulting from the use of a particular word/expression in multiple senses within an argument. It is a type of ambiguity that stems from a phrase havin ...

– the misleading use of a term with more than one meaning or sense (by glossing over which meaning is intended at a particular time). * accent – when the use of bold or italics causes confusion over the meaning of a statement. *

amphiboly Syntactic ambiguity, also called structural ambiguity, amphiboly or amphibology, is a situation where a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. Syntactic ambiguity arises not from the range of mean ...

– when a sentence may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous sentence structure. While imprecise language is not desirable in various scientific fields, it may be helpful, illustrative or discussion-stimulative in other contexts. Imprecision in a discourse may or may not be the intention of the author(s) or speaker(s). The role of imprecision may depend on audience, end goal, extended context and subject matter. Relevant players and real stakes will also bear on

truth-grounds The ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'' (widely abbreviated and cited as TLP) is a book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein which deals with the relationship between language and reality and aims to define th ...

of statements.

References

{{reflist Language