A Pragmatic Perspective Of Hedges In News Writing

News writing is not simply a language work done by the journalist to record and report the recent occurrences and developments, but an invisible interaction between the journalist and the audiences.The language used in news writing is basically required to be accurate, objective, succinct and plain. Although precise words and expressions are usually contributive to an accurate transmission of the information between the journalist and audiences, fuzzy language, especially in the form of hedges, is prevalently in existence in news.Effective use of hedges in news writing would bring about special effects when preciseness doesn't take effect.This paper aims to carry out a detailed analysis of the hedging phenomenon in news writing from a pragmatic perspective. The journalistic data in this paper are all selected from the world-wide authoritative media. The main concerns of this paper involve:1) the causes of the appearance of hedges in news writing,2) the linguistic realization of hedges in news writing,3) the pragmatic functions of hedges in news writing,4) the occurrence and frequency of hedges in news writing.This paper consists of six sections.The first section serves as an introduction including the background, research objective, significance and structure of the present study. The second section is the literature review, including the definition and categorization of hedges and a brief review of the previous studies of hedges at home and aboard. The third section exposes the main causes of the hedging phenomenon in news writing and enumerates seven linguistic realizations of hedges in news writing. The fourth section carries out a detailed analysis of the pragmatic functions of hedges in news writing within the theoretical framework of Cooperative Principle and Face-saving Theory. The fifth section goes further in the discussion on the occurrence and frequency of hedges in four types of news, economic/business news, political news, scientific/technological news and news commentary and provides some evidences of how the context of news affects the choice of hedges in news writing. The sixth section is the conclusion, including the major findings and limitations of the present study and the implications and suggestions for further research.