A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In Journalistic English

As a new discipline, the basic theory of fuzzy linguistics is "Fuzzy Sets", which was advanced by L.A.Zadeh, professor in University of California, in 1965. Its main research field was restricted to semantics at the very beginning, such as the causes for semantic fuzziness and the quantitative analysis of fuzzy meaning, etc. Later, since there is frequent use of fuzzy language in communication, fuzzy linguistics begins to lay stress on the research carried out from the perspective of pragmatics, for example, the study of the pragmatic functions of fuzzy language in verbal communication, lawyers' arguments, diplomatic activities, etc.As a part of fuzzy language, hedges exist prevalently in all kinds of languages. Therefore, researches on hedges have been carried out from different aspects by a lot of scholars, such as Zadeh, Lakoff, Brown, Levinson, Myers and Hyland abroad, Wu Tieping, He Ziran and Zhang Qiao in China. In recent years, great progress has been made in analyzing the application of hedges in language of different styles.As the mass media, news plays an increasingly important role in people's daily life and has been received much more attention from people. It is the report on events or a kind of situation and is also the presentation of events happening recently. News not only provides people with all kinds of latest information about the society, economy, science and technology, etc, but also presents comments on recent events. Therefore, as the language used in news, journalistic English is basically required to be accurate, brief and objective. However, the special requirement to journalistic English does not absolutely exclude the existence of hedges. On the contrary, the use of hedges is indispensable in order to achieve the accuracy and objectivity of news.Based on the studies of hedges at home and abroad, the thesis introduces three categorizations of hedges—semantic, grammatical and pragmatic categorization, among which the pragmatic categorization advanced by E.F.Prince et al is emphasized. Combining with the characteristics of news, the thesis analyzes the reasons why hedges exist in journalistic English. Then the author analyzes the use of hedges in journalistic English in detail with the Cooperative Principle and the Face-threatening Act Theory. It is found that hedges flout one maxim just in...