A Comparative Study On Hedges In Chinese And English Real Estate Advertisements From Contextual Adaptation Perspective

Human language is featured by fuzziness. In the1970s, linguists mainly studiedhedges from the perspective of semantic. As time passes by, the studies of hedges aredeveloping and enriching to different perspectives, such as logic, applied pragmatics,discourse, artificial intelligence analysis and so on. Hedges are not only an integralpart of our daily life, but also a powerful tool in commercial field, especially incommercial advertisements.With the rapid development of economy and technology, advertisements havebecome a significant device of communication and exert great influences on people’sdaily life. Language has many functions, such as informative, expressive,performative function. The original features of advertisements are informativity,conciseness, accuracy and persuasion. Therefore, advertisements can make use ofthese functions to propagandize products/service or persuade and induce consumers tobuy the commodities. Furthermore, with the fiercer market competition as well as thedevelopment of modern hedging theories and fuzzy linguistics, the fuzziness ofadvertising language is gradually highlighted. Now, it has become one of theprominent features of advertising language. Real estate advertisement is an importantbranch of advertisements. The hedges used in real estate advertisement have uniquefeature.Scholars at home and abroad mainly study hedges in the discourse of law,politics, literature, diplomacy, business, technology, negotiation, etc. However, studieson hedges in real estate advertisements are much less than that in other fields.Therefore, this thesis tries to study hedges in Chinese and English real estateadvertisements from Contextual Adaptation Theory, which is regarded as itstheoretical basis, combining with the Politeness and Cooperative Principle. Besides,the author tries to find out the purpose and reason of using hedges in Chinese andEnglish real estate advertisements and the similarities as well as differences betweenthem. Studying hedges in real-estate advertisement is of great significance: we canhave a better understanding of hedges that are used in real-estate advertisement. Andbesides, it broadens the research range of contextual adaptation theory. Furthermore, itis helpful for the advertisers at home and abroad to properly use hedges to improvethe conciseness, accuracy, flexibility and creativity of the advertisements. And for theconsumers, they can have a better understanding of hedges in the real estateadvertisements and avoid falling into advertisements traps.