Pragatic Studies Of Hedge "Not/No"

Fuzziness is one of the intrinsic features of natural language, and it pervasively exists in the interior of the language system and on all levels of language use. Although the phenomenon of linguistic fuzziness has long been noticed and studied, as a discipline specialized in the study of the fuzziness of language and fuzzy language, fuzzy linguistics has a history of no more than fifty years, its theoretical basis being the "Fuzzy Sets" theory proposed by the American scientist L.A. Zadeh in 1965. At the beginning, the main study fields of fuzzy linguistics are restricted to semantics; later on this subject is researched from the angles of pragmatics, lexicology, syntax, psychology, and cognitive psychology, etc.Hedge is an integrated part of fuzzy linguistics. Though scholars of various countries have studied fuzzy linguistics and hedges, no detailed research has been done on hedge "not/no", the important negation carriers. In everyday communication, speakers will not always agree with what others have said and sometimes, one speaker may express different ideas, or show disapproval, disagreement, anger or even criticism. These occasions may hinder normal communication or create unfriendly atmosphere, and will even further affect the relationship between speakers. Thus this thesis attempts to, from pragmatic aspect, provide a comparatively comprehensive discussion on hedge "not/no", analyze its pragmatic value and point out strategies to save the aforementioned situations.This paper consists of six parts. Chapter 1 serves as an introduction, in which the author gives some detailed background knowledge of various researches of fuzzy language from L.A. Zadeh, Lakoff to Chinese researchers He Ziran, and He Zhaoxiong and so on. Then it briefly introduces the research methodology and outline of the paper. Chapter 2 goes from the definitions of fuzziness, hedge, and hedging of different scholars to the summaries of previous studies and sums up the classification of hedges and hedging. Chapter 3 begins to touch on hedge "not/no". It begins with the reason of writing this paper and moves on to touch upon general knowledge of hedge "not/no" and its classification. As to the classification, it is a part slightly neglected by scholars for many years. Chapter 4 focuses on pragmatic studies of hedge "not/no" from the principles of Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and Relevance Theory and the next chapter highlights the pragmatic values of hedge "not/no", such as withholding certain information or bridging information gap, enhancing language effects and flexibility, decreasing face threatening act and so on. The last chapter concludes the whole thesis and then points out deficiencies of this paper for further studies.