From Vagueness To Hedges

Vagueness is a common and important feature of natural language. It is also a universal phenomenon in the real world and in human cognition. Vagueness in language, or vague language, is the linguistic reflection of vagueness in the real world and in cognition. Moreover, in any natural language, there are certain expressions whose function is to modify the degree of vagueness of other words and expression. These expressions are what were first studied as hedges.With the deepening of the study of hedges, the scope of the concept has gradually been widened. Hedges, as they are studied today, not only include adjectives and adverbs that "make things fuzzier and less fuzzy", but also modal words and expressions that indicate the speaker's attitude toward what he or she is saying, such as reservation of opinion, uncertainty and citation etc. Not using any hedge can be viewed as a special case of the use of hedges, i.e. zero hedge. This special use indicates that the speaker regards the propositional content as factual and therefore there is no need for the speaker to mark his or her attitude with hedges. There are even researchers who think that as long as any language, regardless of its form, is used to reduce or avoid the speaker's commitment to a proposition, the language can be considered as hedging. The widened concept of hedges has made the Chinese translation of hedge, i.e. "模糊限制语", unsuitable, because the Chinese term limits itself in form and is no longer in keeping with the current development and tendency in the subject.Hedges play an essential and irreplaceable role in communication. Not only do they make language more polite, they are also important devices to achieve indirectness in speech acts. Hedges have such pragmatic functions as achieving politeness and indirectness because they can alter some important variables in speech act. These variables include force, or tone, and the expressed psychological states.