Vagueness, uncertainty, certainty. Reflections on native and non-native speakers

The paper aims at discussing the notion of vagueness and the relationship among vagueness, certainty, uncertainty. First of all, we refer to Peirce’s definition of vague proposition, the works of Bühler and Wittgenstein on uncertainty and certainty, and De Mauro’s definition of vagueness. The ‘banks’ of vagueness - grammar, epi-linguistic use of words and phrases, possibility to re-define the area of use of the words – are analyzed. The second part of this paper is dedicated to the analysis of the strategies of vagueness on the pragmatic dimension of language and the connection that vagueness sets with uncertainty and certainty. Based on a corpus of spoken Italian as FL, the analysis shows the dominance of the epi-linguistic use