A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In The Top Talk Program

Vagueness is an essential feature of human language, and it is also an importantcharacteristic of human psychology. Vague concept and vague judgment play a very importantrole in knowing the real world. Research on hedges has been paid more attention to by lots ofscholars, and carried out from different perspectives. The term hedge was introduced andanalyzed first by G. Lakoff (1972), who introduced the concept of hedge and hedging“wordswhose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy”in his paper“Hedges: A Study in MeaningCriteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concept”. In China, Wu Tieping, the first scholar to researchfuzzy language, published his article“Elementary Research of Fuzzy Language”in 1979. Inrecent years, a great deal of researches on hedges has been carried out in different fields.However, little attention has been paid to hedges in high-end TV talk show programs.With the rapid development of mass media, high-end TV talk shows permeate our dailylife and exert remarkable influence on our society. TheTop Talk program is a sub-section of“Oriental Horizon”, which is a kind of news magazine programs of China Central Television.The Top Talk program has won widespread popularity relying on its accurate part positioning,excellent dialogue, rich interviewees resources and excellent production groups, and has beenan influential brand-name program of China Central Television. The pragmatic study ofhedges in the Top Talk program has some theoretical and practical significance.This thesis aims to present a comparatively comprehensive study on the application ofhedges in the Top Talk program and give readers a clear picture showing of the program fromthe pragmatic perspective. Firstly, the writer offers a general introduction of the thesis.Secondly, based on overviews of the previous studies about the fuzzy language and hedgesboth at home and abroad, the definition, classification and functions of hedges and thedevelopment of the high-end talk shows are presented. Thirdly, the writer displays thecooperative principles of Grice’s Conversational Implicature, Brown and Levinson’s facetheory and Leech’s politeness principle, which makes readers know more about the theorydeveloped both at home and abroad. Fourthly, Methodology is presented, which presentsresearch questions, data collection and data analysis. Fifthly, based on Grice’s cooperative principles of Conversational Implicature, Brown and Levinson’s face theory and Leech’spoliteness principle, the writer analyzes how hedges function in the program. Finally, throughquantitative and qualitative investigation to the corpus, the writer gets the findings and resultsof the research and gives the limitation of the thesis and suggestions for future research.The language in the Top Talk program is a typical communicative pattern, the analysis ofwhich helps people understand more about hedges in daily communication. It enhancespeople’s awareness of adopting strategy of hedges in conversation to achieve successfulcommunication. The TV talk show programs, especially the Top Talk program, could offer aplatform for English learners to learn inter-cultural communication, and meanwhile it offers aplatform to understand fuzzy language very well.