A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In TV Talk Show

Language is a communicative tool of passing information, expressing feelings, ideasor attitudes. In order to achieve successful communication, people often use precisewords to express their thoughts. But in some cases, people have to use some vague wordsto make the conversation go on smoothly. Vagueness is the intrinsic nature of language. Ithas more positive functions than precise language. In some communicative situations,vague language has strong expressing power and it is a very important expressingstrategy. Hedge is a very important member in the vague language family, and it is themost common and typical vague language. With the development of the times, TV hasbecome the main media tool. TV talk show, being the main carrier of the language, isbecoming more and more popular to people. In TV talk show, the language of theinterviewer and the interviewee is closely related to the quality of the program and thebroadcasting effect. In order to achieve some communicative goal, the communicatorsoften use hedges as the effective communicative method during the process of theinterview. But little has been done about hedges from the pragmatic angle, especiallyfrom TV talk show.The author takes TV talk show programs of CCTV-1“Top Talk”, CCTV-3“Artists’ Life” and the Phoenix Satellite TV “Meet with Lu Yu for Your Stories” as the corpuswithin the framework of the Cooperative Principle，the Politeness Principle and FaceTheory in pragmatics, combining the theory with the concrete examples in the descriptiveway, analyze the pragmatic functions of the hedges and the strategies they use and thereasons for using hedges in order to achieve the communicative goals. The findings ofthe analysis are:1. The hedges in TV talk show can realize some functions, such asshowing politeness, realizing self-protection, leaving room for the speakers, increasinghumor and relax atmosphere;2. The reasons for using hedges are: saving time,deliberately withholding information, power and politeness and lacking specificinformation;3.The two partners in TV talk show take some strategies such as upgrading,downgrading and magnify or narrow the degree of the value intentionally to achieve thecommunicative purpose.This research can expand the related fields about pragmatics. Moreover, it helps tofind the communicative techniques and the transmission rules in TV talk show, and theuseful ways of improving the hosts’ power of using language.