Comparative Study On Hedges In Chinese College Students' And English Native Speakers' Oral Production

Hedges are one of the hottest topics of fuzzy linguistics. Previous studies on hedges used by Chinese EFL learners are always confined in written language, while few are deepened into the distribution of hedges in oral language. This paper aims to analyze hedges used by advanced Chinese college students. So the author chooses the top ten contestants of the 21st Century National English Speaking Competition and uses their discourses in the Question and Answer part of the Speaking Competition as the research material. Based on the classification model of Hyland as well as that of Prince et al. and Varttala, this paper conducts a comparison on the distribution of lexical hedges used by Chinese speakers and English native speakers through using Antconc 3.2.1 (statistical software of corpus) and the chi-square test of SPSS13.0 to see whether there are any significant frequency differences. Then this paper analyzes the possible reasons for the differences and conducts a pragmatic analysis on those hedges used dramatically differently by Chinese speakers and English native speakers:based on the adaptation theory, the thesis analyzes the meta-pragmatic awareness of speakers to explore the communicative functions of those hedges, helping Chinese EFL learners to learn those hedges. The latter data is collected from some foreign interview programs that can reflect their real verbal communication competence.The result shows:comparing with English native speakers, there is no obvious difference on the overall frequency of hedges use. But the advanced Chinese college students underuse some rounders like about, some hearer-oriented hedges like know and do not use some adaptor like pretty and kinda, meanwhile they also overuse hedges like very, will, think and believe and the variety of hedges used by the advanced Chinese college speakers is much less. One possible reason for the differences is the advanced Chinese college students have not a clear idea of certain hedges'concepts and functions. The amount of hedges they know is less than that of English native speakers. So the present study conducts a pragmatic study on those hedges used dramatically differently based on adaptation theory through the analysis of the speakers'meta-pragmatic awareness to explore how the meta-pragmatic awareness affects speakers'hedges choosing for further discussing the communicative function of those hedges.The pragmatic study on hedges shows there are mainly four kinds of functions of those hedges used differently by the advanced Chinese college students and English native speakers1. Rounder can make expression much precise and reasonable so as to help speaker avoid conveying wrong information; It can also help to make adaptation to speaker's certain psychological motivation for achieving some communicative purposes; 2. Modal auxiliaries can show speaker's prediction of the possibility of the utterance; 3. Hearer-oriented hedges can help speakers to explicitly express his opinion and attitude so as to give hearer the right of accepting it or not; 4. Hearer-oriented hedges can help to shorten the distance between speaker and hearer or invite hearer to participate in the deduction process and make conclusion based on the mutual knowledge so as to make hearer accept the opinion of him.The verbal communication is impromptu which makes the proper use of hedges become difficult but the proper use of hedges can help communicator achieve various communication goals. The present study hopes to offer some practical significance to the real verbal communication and arouse more and more attention of Chinese EFL learners on hedges. The analyzing result of the distribution of hedges used by the advanced Chinese college students in the present study also differentiates from previous studies. So this study is expected to offer some implications for further studies on hedges.