A Contrastive Analysis Of Hedging In English And Chinese "Economic Analysis" Writings

Since vagueness of language was discovered, much attention has been shifted to the research on vague terms and hedges of human language. And the explorations of hedges receive attentions from semantics, syntactic and pragmatics. Enlightened by the research abroad, the research on hedging in China has been underway. But we find that explorations of hedges in specific genres are relatively few and the field extended to hedges in news English turns out to be a little trodden path. This thesis attempts to give an overall contrastive study of hedges between English and Chinese backed up with the pragmatic classifications proposed by Prince et al and Hyland. With this purpose, the thesis is to explore three questions: What are the similarities and the differences of the hedging forms on the stylistic level in "Economic Analysis" both Chinese and English? What are the pragmatic functions of these hedges and how does the research cast light on the professional writing of "Economic Analysis" and the viewpoint reading of English "Economic Analysis" by the Chinese readers as well as on the translation of hedges between Chinese and English through the analysis of data from Economic analysis in Chinese and English magazines.It begins with a description of hedge distribution in both data in the framework of categorizations on pragmatic level. The chapter of analysis illustrates hedges in the classifications of approximators and shields as well as content-oriented hedges and reader-oriented hedges. A quantitative and a qualitative results show that the range and number of hedges in Chinese and English corpora are different in terms of stylistic distributions. However, it is found that choices of hedges in English and Chinese are guided by the Cooperative Principles in a sense.