| Hedging is an important pragmatic strategy, and linguists have done a lot of research on it. However, according to the available literature, there are few studies on hedges in the discourse of foreign press briefings. The existing sporadic studies simply describe and summarize hedges in the discourse of foreign press briefings. The discourse of foreign press spokesperson is the carrier of national policy and position, which is the important source of news media. In order to fulfill their missions, the spokespersons’ words should be objective, tactful, flexible and vague. The proper use of hedges in foreign press briefings will not only embody politeness, but also gain the initiative in the Q & A, and achieve the desired effect. Therefore, doing the comparative research on hedges in the discourse of the Chinese and American foreign press briefings, finding out its similarities and differences,and revealing the ideological differences reflected by hedges have important research value.Based on Fairclough’s (1989) theory and the theory of functional linguistics, combined with the theories of Comparative Linguistics, Journalism, Communication and Diplomacy,this dissertation establishes the overall analytical framework from three dimensions: text analysis, discourse practice and social practice. This dissertation studies hedges in the discourse of the Chinese and American foreign press briefings by the combination of micro and macro interpretation. In this framework, this study seeks to address two main issues:(1) At the micro level, what are the similarities and differences in the use of hedges in the discourse of Chinese and American foreign press briefings?(2) At the macro level, what are the ideological differences reflected by using of hedges in the discourse of Chinese and American foreign press briefings?In order to answer the above research questions, two corpora have been established:the corpus of Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs Press Briefings and the corpus of American State Department Press Briefings. According to the research aims in each chapter, four sub-corpora have been established with data extracted from the spokesperson’s discourse and news reporters’ discourse from two main corpora.This study adopts quantitative and qualitative methods to make a comparative study of hedges in Chinese and American foreign press briefings, to study the characteristics and the causes of using different types of hedges in the two languages, and to reveal the ideological meaning behind using hedges. This study has got some valuable findings as follows:Firstly, the findings on the micro level:The frequency of Plausibility Shields in American corpus is much higher than that in Chinese corpus, but the frequency of Attribution Shields in Chinese corpus is higher than that in American corpus. In accordance with the frequency from high to low order, three types of subjects used by Chinese spokespersons in the Plausibility Shields are: "zhong fang"(China), ’wo men"(we) and "wo"(I); and the three types of subjects used by American spokesperson in the Plausibility Shields are: "I","we" and "the United States".The high-frequency words of the Plausibility Shields expressing opinions used by Chinese spokesperson are "wo men xi wang"(we hope), "zhong fang zhi chi"(China support) and"wo xiang"(I think),which are different from "I think" and "we believe" in the discourse of American spokesperson. The highest frequency of modal verbs in the Chinese corpus is high valued one, but in the American corpus is low valued one. The statistic results of Attribution Shields in the four sub-corpora are: ⅰ) Chinese spokesperson use more Attribution Shields with news sources than American spokesperson; reporters use more Attribution Shields with and without news sources than foreign spokespersons in two countries respectively. ⅱ) In order to maintain the objective and neutral attitude,spokespersons and reporters incline to choose Attribution Shields without the emotional tone. ⅲ ) In the four sub-corpora, the most frequently used Attribution Shields without news sources is "ju bao dao"(according to reports) in the corpus of reporters in Chinese press briefings.The frequencies of using Adaptors and Rounders in the Chinese corpus are lower than the frequencies in the American corpus. This study finds that Chinese and American spokespersons tend to use Adaptors of high degree to strengthen their tones, but the use of Adaptors in the discourse of American spokespersons is more diversified. In the Chinese and American press briefings, Rounders of numerical type are often used in the following situations: ⅰ) spokespersons and reporters want to give prominence to the key points and make the discourse concise;ⅱ) the spokespersons don’t have a clear understanding of the numbers involved in the questions raised by reporters, they tend to use Rounders of numerical type to avoid making mistakes;ⅲ) in other cases, when the question raised by reporters is related to the specific numbers that the spokespersons cannot disclose, they would use vague numbers to safeguard the interests of the state. Rounders of non-numerical type is often used by spokespersons to exaggerate or strengthen the tone. In Chinese, these words "yi xie","bu fen",""ge bie","you xie" and so on which are similar to the meaning of the word "some" in English,also belong to the Rounders of non-numerical type. These words can be used to dance around the issues, especially for some tough questions. Chinese Foreign Spokespersons are accustomed to using the Rounders that indicate the continuation of time,such as "bu duan"(constant), "yi guan"(consistent), "yi zhi"(always) and so on. These words can help them to stress that China’s attitude or approach to a certain problem has never changed. There are some common features in using Rounders expressing frequency in two countries. The most notable one is that the frequencies of using "zai ci" and "again’,(which have the same meaning) is very high.Although the words are very simple, they contain a pragmatic presupposition, that is, the same attitude must be expressed before. There are 28 expressions in the American corpus that have the similar function as the word "deng"(and so on) in Chinese, but the frequency of "deng" is much higher than all of the similar words in American corpus.Secondly, the findings on the macro level:The main aim of this study is to reveal the ideological differences in using hedges in Chinese and American corpora, and to explain the social and cultural causes of the differences. According to van Dijk’s (1993) interpretation of ideology, based on the results of quantitative research and the analysis of corpus, this study proposes that hedges in the discourse of Chinese and American foreign press briefings reflect cultural values, the diplomatic ideology, and the national position. Case studies are conducted in the approach of Critical Discourse Analysis to deepen our understanding.The implications of this study in theory, method and practice are as follows:Theoretical implications: (1) This study applies the theory of CDA, Comparative Linguistics, Journalism, Communication and Diplomacy to study hedges in the discourse of foreign press briefings, which embodies the mutual integration between linguistics and other humanities. (2) In this study, the classification of hedges is more detailed than the previous classifications, and this classification applies to both Chinese and English. The 10 sub-categories are added and the pragmatic functions of hedges are refined.Methodological implications: This study has established two main corpora and four sub-corpora. All of the data are real, and collected from the Chinese and American foreign press briefings. This study applies many techniques of corpus linguistics which are combined with CDA in the comparative analysis of hedges in Chinese and American foreign press briefings.Practical implications: (1) To provide appropriate linguistic and pragmatic reference of using hedges for those Chinese Foreign Spokespersons. (2) To help the public learn how to interpret utterances from spokespersons critically. |
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