JOAN CUTTING is Senior Lecturer in TESOL in the University of Edinburgh, UK. She has published on spoken grammar of academic discourse communities, the English of airport ground staff and Chinese students in the UK. She is author of Analysing the Language of Discourse Communities and Pragmatics and Discourse.

• Acknowledgements Notes on Contributors PART 1: INTRODUCTION Introduction to Vague Language Explored; J.Cutting PART 2: VAGUENESS AND GENRE 'This We Have Done': the Vagueness of Poetry and Public Relations; G.Cook 'About Twelve Thousand or so': Vagueness in North American and UK Offices; A.Koester Caught Between Professional Requirements and Interpersonal Needs: Vague Language in Health Care Contexts; S.Adolphs, S.Atkins & K.Harvey 'Well Maybe not Exactly, but it's Around Fifty Basically?': Vague Language in Mathematics Classrooms; T.Rowland 'I think he was Kind of Shouting or Something': Uses and Abuses of Vagueness in the British Courtroom; J.Cotterill PART 3: PSYCHOLOGY OF VAGUENESS Vague Language for Self-Protective Avoidance: Tension Management in Conference Talks; H.Trappes-Lomax 'Looking out for Love and all the Rest of It': Vague Category Markers As Shared Social Space; J.Evison, M.McCarthy & A.O'Keefe PART 4: CROSS-CULTURAL VAGUENESS The Use of Vague Language across Spoken Genres in an Intercultural Hong Kong Corpus; W.Cheng { / [ Oh ] Not A < ^ Lot > }: Discourse Intonation and Vague Language; M.Warren 'Und tralala': General Extenders in German and New Zealand English; J.Holmes & A.Terraschke PART 5: CONCLUSION 'Doing more stuff - where's it going?': Exploring Vague Language Further; J.Cutting Index