A Corpus-based Study Of Hedges In "Friends"

Hedges are an important part of fuzzy language. They are common phenomena and play a vital role in verbal communication. This paper explores the connotations, classifications, and functions based on the relevant domestic and abroad studies. As the problem on how hedges should be defined remains unsolved and keeps linguistics puzzling for decades, this paper initiates with an attempt to work out a clearer and more comprehensive definition as well as specifically introduce Prince et al (1982)'s classification of hedges as a working classification in this paper. Useful insights obtained from the literature review conclude that since more scholars pay attention to the studies of hedges in written discourse, investigations of hedges in spoken discourse of specific genres are the areas that need more attention. Due to the rise of Corpus Linguistics, corpus-based methods reflect the actual functions and usage of hedges in the real context, thereby overcoming traditional research methods with subjectivity and intuition. However, there is few qualitative and quantitative analyses of corpus-based hedge studies .Thus the present paper locates the research on a corpus-based study of hedges in the 823,537-word scripts of a popular American sitcom TV show"Friends". Both qualitative and quantitative analyses are undertaken to portray the specific features of hedges in"Friends". The results show that people attend to use more approximators than shields. There is not a very obvious gender difference in using hedges, due to hedges are related to some social factors such as social position, profession and so on .The research ends up with a specification of pragmatic functions labeled hedges perform. Hedge has multi-functions in verbal communication, proper application of hedges can not only greatly improve teaching standard but also strengthen students'pragmatic competence in communication. Last but not least, this paper points out that the analysis on hedges is of great practical and guiding significance to foreign language teaching and such language researches.