A Study Of Pragmatic Functions Of Linguistic Hedges In Utterance Production And Comprehension From The Perspective Of Cognitive Pragmatics

Linguistic hedges are important pragmatic markers in verbal communication. Inspoken communication and academic texts, linguistic hedges occur in those sensitivetopics, or on those occasions, in which the speaker tries to avoid his own responsibility,orinwhichthespeakerfearsthatthehearermayfeeluncomfortable.ManyScholarshavetried to make considerably comprehensive analysis of the language phenomena from theperspectives of semantics or pragmatics, etc. The researcher of the dissertation tries tocarry out the exploration and research of linguistic hedges in utterance production andcomprehension from the perspective of cognitive pragmatics, mainly of the cognitivefeatures and the cognitive mechanism, such as the relationships between the utteranceproposition and cognitive context, the relationships between the contextual effect andrelevance, etc. in the use of linguistic hedges in verbal communication, applying Sperber& Wilson's Relevance Theory and Verschueren's Metapragmatic Awareness Theory asthe theoretical framework of the research. In terms of the forms, hedges can be dividedinto word forms and syntactic forms. From the semantic perspective, hedges can beclassified into four types. The first type consists of some adjectives and adverbs likemaybe, almost, somewhat, sort of, a little, etc.; the second type refers some adjectives oradverbs containing such suffixes as"-ish"and"-like"; the third type includes thoseconjunctive phrases as"as if","as though","so…that", etc. to indicate the speaker'shesitation; thefourthtypeis composedofsomesyntacticforms orsomeotherphrases. Interms of pragmatic functions, hedges are classified into shields and approximators.Shieldscanalsobedividedintoplausibilityshieldsandattributionshields;approximatorsinto adaptors and rounders. Shields are used by the speaker to make a direct inferenceabout the content of an utterance or to indirectly express the speaker's attitude by usingothers'beliefs or opinions, so that the force of the utterance can be mitigated.Approximatorsareusedtomodifythetruthandscopeoftheutterance. Inthisdissertation, linguistic hedges in verbal communication are explored and analyzed from theperspective of cognitive-pragmatics.From the perspective of cognitive-pragmatics, language use cannot be isolated fromcognition. Language is considered as the window of cognition, from which we can knowthe psychological states, opinions and attitudes of the communicators. Only when thecommunicator knows what happens to the topic can he make certain expressions by usinglanguage or some linguistic devices. As we know, when the speaker is aware that acertain topic will cause a negative influence, or when he is worried that he will be in anunfavorable condition, the use of hedges in verbal communication is often made toindicate the speaker's efforts for mitigation or politeness. At the same time the speakerhopes to express his own attitude, opinion, etc. The purpose of this research is mainly (1)to analyze the pragmatic functions of hedges; (2) to reveal how a communicativeintention is achieved by the use of hedges; (3) to explore the achievement of thecommunicative effect by the use of hedges; and (4) to provide L2 learners with someimportant communicative skills and improve their communicative awareness.To achieve this goal, Sperber & Wilson's Relevance Theory is used as the theoreticalframework and hedges in verbal communication are analyzed and studied from theperspective of cognitive-pragmatics. In the research, the Corpus of ContemporaryAmerican English (COCA), an online corpus, is employed. It is designed and provided byMark Davies, a professor of corpus linguistics in Brigham Young University in USA.This research tries to investigate the commonly used hedges in English from spokendiscourse, fictions, newspapers, magazines and academic texts. Quite a number ofexamples in the dissertation are collected from this corpus. Through the careful analysisand investigation, we have made the following major findings. Firstly, in linguisticcommunication, pragmatic functions of hedges are cognition-driven. Before the speakerproduces any utterance, he has to take into consideration many cognitive factors, such asthe social relationship between the speaker and hearer, degree of politeness, thepossibility of responsibility or the danger of criticism, etc. In this case, he will make acareful choice in using some linguistic devices. Secondly, in verbal communication, it shows from the analysis and investigation of indirectness, negative politeness and FTAsof utterances that, when hedges are used to observe the communicative principles (e.g.the CP and the PP), the cognitive environments of the speaker and the hearer tend toinfluence each other, correlate to each other and agree with each other and in the end thecommunicative intention is realized. Thirdly, in verbal communication, the use of hedgesmakes clearer the speaker's communicative intention. Hedges have actually functioned aspragmatic markers, indicating the speaker's attitude or opinion about the topic in questionin an ostensive way, thus helping to change the original cognitive environment that thehearer has. Fourthly, the hedged interactions are usually FSA-driven. Almost all thehedged interactions are related to some sensitive, direct, unpleasant, unacceptable ornegative topics. From the analysis and investigation of hedged interactions, we find thatthe speaker always tries to observe some politeness strategies, such as hedging strategiesand perform saving face acts (FSAs) so that the hearer can possibly have chances to getout of a predicament or whatever in the sensitive, direct, unpleasant, unacceptable ornegative topics. Fifthly, in the analysis and investigation, we have found that hedges inthe structures of utterances are relatively the independent components. A hedge can be aword or a phrase or sometimes a syntactic structure. It can be put almost at any place inan utterance--at the beginning, in the middle, or at the end. They are grammaticallyoptional, syntactically flexible and pragmatically interpretable. Sixthly, the use of hedgesnot only helps encode the conceptual information, but accounts for the proceduralinformation as well. They are used to help the hearer understand the speaker'scommunicative intention. Seventhly, an analysis of the ratios and frequencies of linguistichedges in the Corpus of Contemporary American English (COCA) shows that linguistichedges are more often used in spoken contexts than in academic texts for the reason ofthe sensibility to a certain context. And finally, it is found that hedges can usually lessenthe processing effort in utterance comprehension.