| The study of vague language is an important area of research in modern linguistics. For several decades, vagueness of natural language has aroused wide interest in the academic field. Innumerable scholars and linguists have studied vague language of various fields from different perspectives. Hedges, as an important part of vague language, have received much attention too. But, many researches on vague language have been carried out in the field of semantics or pragmatics and the relevant literature shows that research on hedges is mainly focused on only one language or on other fields, like advertisements and political speeches. The cross-culture studies of hedges in the Scientific and Technological research articles with the function of hedges in these articles are little reported. To explore and compare hedges in different languages, readers can improve the understanding and communication between Chinese and English scientific researchers, and facilitate translation of hedges in writing research articles. Therefore, the author aims at making a comprehensive comparison of hedges in Chinese and English scientific and technological research articles on the basis of the definition and classification of hedges made by Salager-Meyer (1994). Furthermore, the author investigates the functions of hedges and analyzes the implication of this research to translation. The author scrutinizes the hedges of the samples in the corpus and probes the statistics in order to answer the following research questions.(1)What are the similarities and differences in hedges between Chinese and English scientific and technological research articles in terms of types and occurrence frequency?(2)What are the functions of hedges in Chinese and English scienctific and technological research articles based on pragmatic theories?(3)What are the implications of the results to translation of Chinese and English scientific and technological research articles?According to the results, this thesis indicates the some similarities and differences. After according to Verschueren's Adaptation Theory, the author finds that hedges may perform two possible functions in Chinese and English scientific and technological research articles: adaptation to contextual correlation and adaptation to communicative functions. The lack of time and inadequate data may affect the accuracy of the results. On the whole, however, frequency of hedges in Chinese research articles is lower than that in English ones. The results suggest that Chinese writers ignore the usage of hedges and lack the knowledge of how to write and translate their articles into informative scientific research articles in English. Therefore, it is expected that these findings may have implications for the translation of Chinese research articles into English. So more and more Chinese could strengthen their ability to translate their papers into acceptable and appropriately hedged English scientific and technology research articles in future. |
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