| As a typical representative of fuzzy language, hedges widely exist in verbalcommunication, and this term was first put forward by G. Lakoff in1972. Since then,hedges arouse more and more scholars’ interests. For example, Prince et al.(1982),Hyland (1994), Channel (2000), Wu Tieping (1999), He Ziran (1985), etc. havestudied hedges from different subfields including functions of hedges, comparativestudy of hedges between Chinese and English, discourse analysis and so on.News, as the mass medium, plays a very important role in people’ daily life andattracts more and more scholars’ attention.Although there have been a lot of studies on hedges and news, studies on hedgesin business news are few, let alone the contrastive study of hedges in Chinese andEnglish business news. Therefore, based on Lakoff’s definition and Prince et al.’sclassification of hedges, this study tries to conduct a contrastive study of hedges inChinese and English business news under the framework of Adaptation Theory. To bespecific, this thesis aims to answer the following four questions:(1) What kinds ofhedges are mainly employed in English and Chinese business news?(2) What are thesimilarities and differences of hedges used in English and Chinese business news?(3)How does the Adaptation Theory explain the existence of hedges in English andChinese business news?(4) What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in Englishand Chinese business news?In order to answer these four questions, two corpora are established, namelyEnglish Business News Corpus (EBNC) and Chinese Business News Corpus (CBNC).Each corpus is composed of30pieces of news and all the60pieces of news are fromauthoritative English and Chinese news websites. In order to increase thecomparability, the present study selected the English and Chinese business news ofthe same events. After quantitative and qualitative analysis, results show:(1) Fourkinds of hedges can all be found in these two corpora, but they have differentpreference of hedges, specifically, Chinese business news prefers to use hedges in adescending order of adaptors, rounders, attribution shields and plausibility shields, while English business news prefers to use hedges in a descending order of attributionshields, rounders, adaptors and plausibility shields.(2) Using hedges in business newsadapts to physical world, social world and mental world.(3) Using hedges in businessnews can make the news more accurate, objective, and polite. At the same time, usinghedges in business news can protect the news writers or reporters from takingresponsibility. |
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