A Study Of Hedges In The Dissertations Of Chinese And Foreign Students Majoring In Chinese International Education

In recent years,the scale of foreign students majoring in Chinese international education in our country has been increasing,so has the demand for writing and teaching Chinese degree theses.Hedges,as a pragmatic strategy,have great influence on improving the overall level of academic dissertation and realizing academic communication.Abstract is the outline of the dissertation,the introduction is the preliminary foreshadowing of the main content,and the conclusion is a summary of the research results,has the important academic research value.At present,Hedges in academic discourses are mainly studied in journal papers and English papers at home and abroad,and there are relatively few studies on Chinese degree theses,there is a lack of comprehensive and systematic cognition on the use of hedges in academic writing.Based on this background,this study collects 50 Chinese and foreign master’s degree theses of Chinese international education major and constructs the corpus of abstract,introduction and conclusion respectively,based on the analysis of the features of hedges used in master’s degree theses,this paper finds that foreign students have some problems in the use of hedges,it also analyzes the differences in the pragmatic functions of Hedges in master’s degree theses between China and foreign countries,in order to help foreign students have a deeper understanding of hedges in degree theses,therefore,some suggestions are provided for the teaching of Chinese academic writing in the future,in order to help foreign students improve the efficiency and level of thesis writing.Through comparative analysis,this paper draws the following conclusions:first,Chinese and foreign students have some common features in the use of variable hedges and indirect moderators.Chinese and foreign students have the awareness of using variable hedges in every part,but foreign students tend to use variable hedges more frequently than Chinese students.Chinese students use more indirect moderators in abstracts,introductions and conclusions than foreign students,and foreign students still lack awareness and understanding of the use of indirect moderators.Secondly,there are great differences between Chinese and foreign students in the overall distribution of hedges and the concrete use of direct moderators.The distribution of hedges in the three parts is completely consistent,which fails to reflect the different writing needs of foreign students.The frequency of Chinese students using direct moderating language in three parts is lower than that of foreign students.The frequency of foreign students’ use of direct detente is higher than that of Chinese students,and it often has a clear subject form.The differences in the pragmatic functions of hedges between Chinese and foreign dissertations are as follows:in the conclusion part,both Chinese and foreign students pay attention to changing the degree of modification and relieving the function of the strong mood,in the introduction and the abstract,the function of relieving the author’s responsibility is emphasized,but the foreign students also embody the fuzzy semantic scope and the function of canceling conversational implicature in the conclusion.