| Currently, advertising, especially commercial advertising as an effective business tool plays an increasingly important role in both the daily life and the business world. Commercial advertisement is a bridge between consumers and manufacturers. It introduces products and services to the consumers and, at the same time, persuades them to make purchase. Whereas, the consumers can learn more about the products and service through advertising, and finally buy the things they need. Hence, studying the language of commercial advertising definitely has its practical significance.Advertising language also has its own unique features. In order to realize different functions and special effects, language used in different discourses demonstrates different characteristics. Advertising appeals to more and more linguists, because of its flexible styles, various forms, multimedia, plentiful content, etc. In this thesis, however, the research focuses on the advertising discourse, though many other aspects also deserve to make further exploration. So studying the language of advertising also has its theoretical significance.Lakoff (1972:195) defines"hedges"as"words whose task is to make meanings fuzzier or less fuzzy", such as much, largely, very, sort of and more or less, etc. Hedging is a common phenomenon in human language, and also an effective approach to expression and communication, though fuzzy words are almost neglected until Lakoff(1973) brought Zadeh's fuzzy sets theory into linguistics in 1970s. Since then, many researchers at home and abroad made a lot of studies on this common and interesting language phenomenon-fuzzy language, especially on its essential part-hedges. Nevertheless, studies on hedges are far from enough. Most studies concentrate on the pragmatic or semantic aspect. Few researches are made from the angle of discourse analysis, not to speak of commercial advertisement discourse. This research is aimed to study the interpersonal functions of hedges in commercial advertising discourse based on the theory of Systemic-Functional Grammar.The classification of hedges employed in the present research is established on the achievements of Prince(1982), Salager-Meyer(1994) and Chen Linhua& Li Fuyin(1994). The hedges in the corpus are divided into three main categories: Approximators, Shields and Modal Verbs.The analysis is made on the base of the corpus consisting of 30 English commercial advertisements from four widely-published authentic English journals-Reader's Digest, Elle, New Yorker, Business Week during 2009-2010. The purpose of this study is to answer three questions: (1) whether hedging strategy is widely adopted in commercial advertising; (2) what is the distribution of different hedges in commercial advertising; (3) What kind of the interpersonal functions are mainly realized through hedges in the commercial advertising?Both qualitative and quantitative methods are adopted to analyze the hedges appearing in the corpus. The qualitative analysis is the dominate part in the study. The first step of the analysis after building up the corpus is to classify the hedges in the advertisement. Quantitative approach serving as a necessary supplementation to qualitative analysis plays a critical role in the study. Once the classification of the hedges is determined, the amount of each group of hedges will be the decisive factor of what kind of interpersonal function it will chiefly hold. Thus, we can find out the importance and distribution of hedges in the advertising and the interpersonal functions it realized in the commercials.After making a comprehensive analysis of hedges in the corpus with both qualitative and quantitative methods, we get the following findings:(1) There truly exists a large quantity of hedges in the commercial advertising. The total amount of hedges is 200, and the rate between hedges and the words of the whole corpus is 1:10. Moreover, the clauses with hedges account for 63.7%, over half of the percentage.(2)Hedges in this research are divided into three major categories:Approximators, Shields and Modalities. Among these 200 hedges, Approximators, taking an overwhelming majority 67.5%, occur 135 times. Adaptors, as a sub-category of Approximators, appear 93 times, taking the first place compared with other sub-categories. Shields (29 occurrences) and Modal Verbs (36 occurrences) cover similar percentage, 14.5% and 18% respectively.What's more, within verbs of estimation and probability, the word"help"is the most favorite one for copywriters, appearing 12 times. And the Modal Verbs with lower value, like"can","may","could", are more popular than those with higher value, like"need", in English commercial advertising.(3) Hedges used in the commercial advertising primarily help to realize three interpersonal functions, that is, enhancing precision, relieving responsibility and increasing credibility.Theoretically, the present research studies the interpersonal functions of hedges in English commercial advertising discourse on the theory of Systemic-Functional Grammar. So, the findings of this research will surely become a good supplement to the previous studies in related field.Practically, the study benefits not only advertisers but also the potential consumers. On the one hand, copywriters may learn how to produce good advertising discourse with proper linguistic strategies, rather than deceptive means, to promote the sales. On the other hand, consumers can learn how to appreciate or interpret the commercial advertising better, and therefore, can make informed decisions.What's more, the study may also benefit English learner in reading and writing English. From this research English learner may master a useful linguistic strategy-hedges, which is a usual language phenomenon. Thus, they may grasp English better.To sum up, there are a large number of hedges employed in the commercial advertising, which surely helped the advertiser to realize many important interpersonal functions. And the findings of this research are significant both theoretically and practically.
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