Multimodal Markers of One’s Own and the Other’s Vagueness.

The paper presents some works on the area of vagueness, including the connected mental states of hesitation, hastiness, word-search, and the properties of knowledge such as precision and specificity, and overviews the reasons to be vague and the verbal and body signals that typically communicate one is being vague. Then a qualitative study is presented on how a Speaker multimodally communicates that he himself or the Interlocutor is being vague. On a corpus of four political debates and a judicial debate, the words, gestures, facial expressions and gaze are analyzed through which the Speaker either acknowledges his own vagueness or accuses the Interlocutor to be vague.