A Metafunction And Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedging In Political Diplomatic Language

Hedging is an indispensable part of human language, which can be found in every language. In the political diplomatic occasions, the appropriate use of hedging would contribute to the enhancement of language validity to a certain extent, instead of weakening the accuracy of political diplomatic language.This thesis places extra emphasis on analyzing how Dr.Rice employs hedging to realize her true intention- not only avoid revealing the concrete diplomatic strategies of the United States, but also express their official attitude, which induces grammatical realization of hedging in political diplomatic language on the level of lexis, sentence and context. The diplomats manipulates these grammatical realization to transfer two or more different kinds of illocutionary forces, herein bring about discourse implication or metaphoric effect and make it hard for the addressee to infer the their real intention from their vague expressions. The view which are the special that diplomatic language can be vague holds that there are statements neither true nor false, or can have indeterminate interpretations, to meet purpose of diplomacy or to satisfy each country's national interests and their political relationships.Meanwhile, combined with Adaptation Theory, Politeness Strategy and Cooperative Principle, this thesis makes a tentative analysis to ideational functions, interpersonal functions and textual functions of hedging, in light of metafunctions in Halliday's Systematical Functional Grammar. It is found that hedges can be used to modify the truth of a proposition at the semantic level and promote the acceptability, to achieve the self-protection and politeness at the pragmatic level and to signal the macrostructure of the discourse at the discourse level. The comprehensive command of hedges' metafunctions in political diplomatic language would be a great benefit to make correct decisions in the changeable international situation.