An Investigation On Non-English Major Undergraduates' Ability To Use Hedges

Communicative competence includes linguistic competence and pragmatic competence. Linguistic competence is a language learner's underlying knowledge about the system of grammatical rules (Chomsky, 1965), while pragmatic competence refers to the competence to use language to communicate properly (He Ziran, 1997). They are both of great importance and neither should be ignored in EFL teaching and learning. However, in China, people have for a long time placed emphasis on linguistic competence rather than pragmatic competence. As a result, the learners can remember many words and have abundant knowledge about grammar, but when communicating with English native speakers, they cannot use English properly. Therefore, it's of great significance to study the current state of Chinese EFL learners'pragmatic competence and find out problems existing in it and finally try to find ways to improve it. Hedges are of profound pragmatic functions. They are closely related to many important pragmatic theories and principles such as conversational implicature, cooperative principle and politeness principle. Using hedges properly, the communicators can make their utterances more objective and more polite, thus carrying out the communication smoothly. There has been pragmatic analysis of hedging in various fields, for example, in news writing, philosophical texts, textbooks, economic forecasting, abstracts, medical discourse and so on. The present thesis studies non-English major undergraduates'ability to use hedges as an investigation into the current state of their pragmatic competence. The author firstly picks out the hedges used in 30 texts of New Horizon College English and classifies them into several categories. Each category is illustrated specifically with some examples. Then hedges in 50 non-English major undergraduates'compositions are picked out and analyzed with a comparison to the hedges used in the textbooks. Through the analysis, problems existing in students'using hedges are summarized and the reasons for them are also discussed. These...