| Since Professor L.A.Zadeh in the United States put forward the vagueness theory in 1965, more and more researches based on it have been done in many fields. In recent years, in linguistics, vagueness of language has been paid much attention to. As one of the members in the category of language vagueness, hedging was introduced and analyzed first by G. Lakoff in 1972. From then on, many linguists have studied hedging from various perspectives.However, researches on hedging, though rich and fruitful, are far from being homogeneous and complete. And the researches on hedging in specific genres are relatively few.News, as a kind of mass media, has become a hot topic for research because it plays an important role in the daily life. But in most of the researches, hedging used in English news is seldom mentioned. The researches seeking to discover the deep generation mechanism of it are rare.Based on previous researches on hedging, the thesis analyzes hedging in English news from the perspective of pragmatics. Under Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the author carries out a qualitative and descriptive analysis on hedging in the sixty pieces of news of five fields (politics, economics, technology, sport, and entertainment) selected from two news magazines (Time and The Times). The original point of this thesis is that the author not only attempts to propose the definition and taxonomy of hedging, but also, based on the analysis, proposes the active and passive adaptation model used to explain the deep generation mechanism of hedging phenomenon in English news.It is found that many kinds of hedges exist broadly in all kinds of news. They occur more often in such hard news as political news (8.86%), economic news (7.82%), and technological news (8.21%). In the soft news like sport (5.23%) and entertainment news (4.95%), there are fewer hedges. The use of hedging in news reports is the result of adaptation to the physical world and the mental world. Adaptation to the physical world includes adaptation to accuracy, objectivity and timeliness which are the basic requirements of news writing. Hedging as adaptation to the mental world can be explained as a kind of active hedging strategy adopted by the journalists to achieve certain informative purposes. It is mainly used as strengthening-protection strategy, avoiding-absoluteness strategy, achieving-politeness strategy, and orientating-readers strategy. Finally, the thesis also probes into the pragmatic functions of hedging in English news, points out the limitations of the study, and gives suggestions for future researches.As the studies exploring the deep generation mechanism of hedging in English news are relatively rare, the present research seems to be necessary because of its theoretical value and practical significance. The thesis may enrich the researches on hedge and hedging strategy, especially the researches on the news language strategy. It may help the journalists use hedging properly in reporting news, and help the news readers comprehend news more accurately and efficiently.
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