A Comparative Study Of Hedges In Chinese And American Leaders' Speech

The fuzziness and accuracy of language is an inherent attribute of the natural language. Hedges,as a member of the family of fuzzy words and phrases, can be used to make the speaker express their intentions and attitudes better on certain occasions.Leaders should pay attention to the speech language strategies and verbal expression to ensure that they can speak politely, appropriately, rigorously, accurately in public,because they are on behalf of the national image and interests,and they often need to use hedges. But different languages have different appropriate standards, the people in different culture background who use different hedges specifications, the leaders may vary at the use of hedges in their speeches.This thesis chose hedges as the breakthrough point, and the classifications of E.F.Prince of hedges as the standard. It adopts the method of combining quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis to select the leaders of China and the United States who attend the international conference speech corpus for each 50 in year of 2009 to2015. The speeches involve in political, economic and cultural communications area.The same and different points of using hedges by the leaders of China and the United States has been revealed in the comparative research. At the same time, this paper also analyzed the reasons of the similarities and differences, and the function of hedges in the speech according to the theory of Halliday functional grammar.Finally,another finding is that the leaders of China and the United States using hedges differently can produce certain influences to communicative effection in international diplomacy. The research helped us fully understand the characteristics of hedges used by the leaders of China and the United States, and find that the differences can have an impact on communicative effection.The research also helped us understand the hedges correctly in the different cultural backgrounds.