A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges

Fuzziness is one of the essential features of natural languages. Language as an inevitable outcome of the subjective acting on the objective has fuzzy characteristic; that is due to the fuzzy characteristic of the objective world and the limitation of human cognitive competence. The phenomena of fuzzy language widely exist in people's daily life. People have perceived fuzzy phenomena for a long time, while focused on the special research of fuzzy language for only several decades. The discipline of fuzzy language was initiated with the Fuzzy set theory, which was proposed by Zadeh a professor in America, and then the combination of the Fuzzy set theory and the modern linguistics generated fuzzy linguistics. Among the components of fuzzy language, hedges are one of the most typical and active ones that widely exist in verbal and written communication, playing an important role in communication.Since the 1970s, some scholars abroad have begun to explore hedges in many aspects, while the research on hedges is relatively rare at home. Hedge a linguistic term is proposed originally as a semantic concept, however, with the further study, hedges have gradually developed from the field of semantics to pragmatics. Therefore, the writer has given a deep analysis of hedges and mainly explored the pragmatic functions of hedges based on the former research findings aiming to present a full and deep understanding of hedges. Moreover, the thesis also intends to provide some suggestions for the study of this field.The structure of this thesis is as follows:Chapter 1 mainly introduces the background and purpose of this thesis and its significance. Chapter 2 is the literature review. Firstly the thesis reviews the study of concept of fuzziness, connotation of hedges and then introduces past studies in domestic and abroad. Subsequently Chapter 3 focuses on the theoretical framework of the thesis and introduces some important pragmatic principles, containing Co-operative principle, Politeness principle, FTAs theory and Conversational implicature. Chapter 4 is the main body of this thesis, in which we take verbal and written language as corpus and make an analysis of hedges based on those pragmatic principles. The writer studies the pragmatic functions of hedges and deeply explores the relationship between hedges and contexts to explore the significance and application value of hedges. Chapter 5 is the conclusion part in which major findings of this research are presented. Furthermore, limitations and suggestions are also pointed out for further research.