Hedges And Their Pragmatic Functions In English News Reporting Under Adaptation Theory

Fuzziness is believed to be the intrinsic property of natural language, and fuzzy language appears to be an extremely pervasive phenomenon in language communication. Since American Professor L.A.Zadeh put forward the fuzzy set theory in1965, more and more scholars at home and abroad have carried on studies in many fields based on the theory. Fuzzy linguistics was born with the inspiration of fuzzy set theory. As an important member of fuzzy family, the concept of hedge was first proposed by G. Lakoff in1972. In the1980s, the Chinese scholars like Wu Tieping, He Ziran started their researches in fuzzy linguistics. In recent years, the exploration of fuzzy semantics is the main concern of the fuzzy linguistics in China and some achievements have been made.As is well-known to all, one of the fundamental requirements of news reporting is to provide the public as accurate information as possible. However, through the investigations of different types of news from various news agencies, we can see, hedges are widely employed in all kinds of news reports. But the study of hedges in the specific genres are relatively few, especially the hedges in news reporting is seldom mentioned.Based on previous researches on hedges, the thesis in an attempt to analyze hedges occurred in English news from the angle of pragmatics. The Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory is taken as the theoretical framework in my study. Meanwhile, the author carries out a descriptive analysis on these widely used hedges. The data sources are chosen from the two mainstream newspapers (Los Angeles Times and The New York Times) and they are carefully selected from the five major fields of news reporting--politics, economics, technology, society and sports.From the above analysis, it is found that the use of hedges in news reports is the result of adaptation to the physical world, the mental world and the social world. Meanwhile, the study also explores the pragmatic functions the hedges perform in the process of news reporting, that is, increasing creditability, enhancing efficiency, achieving flexibility, keeping politeness.Therefore, the news reporting does allow the existence of hedges and, in fact, the employment of hedges meets the requirement of objectivity, truthfulness and timeliness of news reports.The thesis may provide us with a different perspective for the study of fuzzy phenomenon and enrich the researches on hedges and hedging strategy in news language.Furthermore, it is hoped to give some implications for the journalists to adopt the hedges more properly.