A Contrastive Study Of Hedges Between English And Chinese Economic News

Language possesses the property of vagueness, one of the presentations of which is the use of hedges. Hedges are common in every language and play an important part in both spoken and written communications. As a research area in the study of vague language, hedging in discourse was first put forward by G Lakoff in1972. Afterwards, other scholars, such as Fraser, Brown & Levinson, Leech, Hubler, Rosch, Myers, etc., studied hedges from different perspectives. At home, the research of hedging began in the late 1970s, pioneered by Professor Wu Tieping in Beijing Normal University who introduced fuzzy language into China. In fact, there are various kinds of words, phrases or sentence patterns that can be considered as hedges in languages. They have plenty of semantic features and pragmatic functions, which can not be omitted and substituted. For a long time, the hedge research has been confined to the level of semantics and syntax. However, with the development of pragmatics and discourse analysis, an increasing number of scholars conducted researches on hedging from pragmatic perspective. Many linguists have studied hedging from various perspectives. However, researches on hedging, though rich and fruitful, are far from enough, and especially the researches on hedging in specific genres are relatively in a small amount.News, as an essential mass media, has become a hot topic for research owing to its great importance in daily life. But in most researches, hedges used in economic news is seldom mentioned, especially the researches on the contrastive analysis between English Economic News (EEN) and Chinese Economic News (CEN) are even rarer. Therefore, this paper, based on the previous researches, including G. Lakoff's definition of hedges, Prince et al.'s classification of hedges and Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, makes an attempt to concentrate on the contrastive study between EEN and CEN so that the similarities and differences of hedges in EEN and CEN can be observed, the reason for the existence of hedges in EEN and CEN can be figured out in the framework of Linguistic Adaptation Theory, and that the frequently occurring pragmatic functions of hedges in EEN and CEN are summarized, all of which can shed some light on the reading and writing of EEN and CEN. To achieve these objectives, this paper revolves around the following three questions:(1) What are the similarities and differences in the frequency and the distribution of these hedges in EEN and CEN? (2) How does the Adaptation Theory account for the existence of hedges in EEN and CEN? (3) What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in EEN and CEN?To answer these questions, the writer establishes two small-scale parallel corpora, in which all the linguistic materials were gathered from two influential websites in Great Britain and mainland China—Financial Times (http://www.ft.com) and 21st Century Economic Reports (http://www.21cbh.com). All the linguistic materials in the parallel corpora are collected through searching the key words of'oil price'and'石油价格'. The two corpora contain respectively 30 articles, with the total word number of 18801 in English database and the total word number of 19141 in Chinese database. In accordance to Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, the four kinds of hedges are recognized in the context of the database. With the help of search function of word file as well as on scrutiny of the context, different kinds of hedges are identified and located so that the frequency and distribution of hedges in EEN and CEN can be figured out. Based on the statistic figures, quantitative, qualitative and descriptive analysis on hedges are carried out in the two corpora. According to Prince et al.'s model of hedges, the four kinds of hedges are commonly seen in EEN and CEN. However, there still exist some differences. EEN and CEN have different preferences of the four kinds of hedges. Their preferred sequences of different hedges in a descending order are listed here:attribution shields, rounders, adaptors and plausibility shields for EEN; adaptors, rounders, attribution shields and plausibility shields for CEN. Obviously, attribution shields are the priority choice for EEN and adaptors for CEN, which indicate that English economic news focus more attention on the source of news than Chinese economic news. Subsequently, under Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory, the author interprets the existence of hedges in EEN and CEN, which is the result of adaptation to both the physical world and the mental world. Adaptation to the physical world includes adaptation to accuracy, objectivity and timeliness which are the fundamental requirements of news reporting. Adaptation to the mental world contains the adaptation to journalists' mental world and readers' mental world. In this dynamic adaptation process, hedges apply effectively pragmatic function in communication, including keeping secrets, enhancing reliability and appropriateness, saving time, and heightening flexibility.