A Corpus-Based Contrastive Study On Hedging In International English Learners' Written Language

This thesis is a corpus-based contrastive study projected to find out the similarities and differences in using hedges among learners of different mother tongues.Hedges are linguistic items that make precise meanings fuzzy or fuzzy meanings less fuzzy and hedging points to such a strategy that we employ in choosing certain linguistic items (Lakoff, 1972:47). Hedges have flexible semantic meanings and various pragmatic functions. Since Lakoff formulated the term hedges, researchers have probed into this universal phenomenon from many subfields ranging from semantics, psycholinguistics, sociolinguistics, discourse analysis to pragmatics. A close review of those researches, however, reveals that most of them are based on native speakers'language and few researches are conducted concerning L2 learners'inter-language. Given that language transfer will influence second language acquisition, would there be some distinguishing features in hedging by learners of different mother tongues? Are there any differences and similarities? Would learners'hedging be influenced by the degree of closeness of their mother tongues to English? Or would learners'hedging be affected by their language proficiencies? In answering those questions, the current study is conducted.Six sub-corpora are chosen from the International corpus of learner English (ICLE), the mother tongues of which are: German, Norwegian, Russian, Czech, Tswana and Chinese. Two independent variables are taken into consideration when this selection is made. They are degree of closeness to English and learners language proficiency. Hedges are divided into four categories according to Prince's (1982) theory, and 20 commonly used langue items functioning as hedges, with 5 in each category, are chosen in the study. Then those hedges are checked in each of the six sub-corpus and their frequencies are recorded. Then SPSS is used in facilitating the analysis of data and in presenting the results.The research has the following main findings: Firstly, English learners of six different mother tongues use Shield more frequently than Approximator and the most frequently used sub-category of hedges is Plausibility, then are Adaptor, Rounder and Attribution successively. Secondly, the data collected after learners are grouped according to the degree of closeness of their mother tongues to English shows that the higher the degree, the more hedges used. Thirdly, the data collected after learners are grouped according to the level of their English proficiencies shows that learners of the lowest proficiency use the least hedges, but learners of highest proficiency do not, as might be expected, use the most hedges. Fourthly, although differences are obvious among groups either divided out according to the degree of closeness or to the language proficiency, any two members within each group exhibit similarities both in terms of sequence in using four hedges and frequencies of each of the four types of hedges. Fifthly, some individual hedges are much more frequently used by learners of certain mother tongue than the other learners.To exploit into the reasons of those differences and similarities is not the focus of the current study and, therefore, only a few possible factors may affect learners'using of hedges are provided. They are: genre, L2 proficiency, mother tongue transfer, pragmatic transfer and formal instruction.Finally, the findings are concluded and the limitations of the study are pointed out and some future researches are suggested.