| Nowadays, news, as a media discourse, is an important access for people to getinformation. Media discourse plays an important role in people‘s lives, which belongsto the dominant discourse. The news commentary is an important part of the mediadiscourse. From the view of modern news dissemination, news commentary alsoplays an important role in the process of dissemination of news. After the occurrenceof the news, the news media will be in line with the principle of evidence-basedprinciples to comment the social hot issues and focuses, which fully reflects thesupervisory role of news as an instrument of public opinion. From the occurrence toreport, it is necessary to give the audience a clear analysis and guidance. In thisprocess, the newspapermen play a crucial role, because they know the facts more thanthat the audience knows. He can release the news, and also he can explain his ownpoint of view. Therefore, the study of the language of the press comment has practicalsignificance. News language itself is unique, especially in news commentary. In orderto make the audience have a better understanding of the news, the author will usesome language strategies and means to achieve special effects.The fuzziness is one of the natural attributes of language, and it is also thefeature of the news language. In recent years, the study of vague language hasaccumulated a wealth of results, especially as a communication strategy, it gains anincreasing concern and extensive research. Therefore, studying the interpersonalfunction of hedges in the background of news commentary discourse has a certainpractical value. This study is framed on modal theory of Systemic FunctionalGrammar, and combined with the study methods of corpus research and discoursestylistics.Firstly, the previous research of hedges and its classification will be overviewed. In this article, the classification of hedges is based on the classification of Prince(1982), Salager Meyer,(1994), and Varttala (1999) and other classification methods.There are three main types of hedge: approximators, shields and modal verbs.Then the relationship between hedges and modality will be discussed. Theinterface of hedges and modality will be expounded on three aspects: definition,overlapped lexical, and semantic expressions. The results show that hedges andmodality are compatibility and overlap. In view of the compatibility between hedgesand modality, hedging modals are the final object of study in the discourse of newscommentary. The main hedging modals of study are: hedging modal operators: can,could, may, might, must, shall, should, will, would, and hedging modal adjuncts:certainly, likely, maybe, perhaps, possibly, surely.Finally, a brief introduction to the structure of the news comments will be done.According to the moves of the news commentary, the frequency of occurrence ofhedges in the different parts will be obtained, and then the correspondent results willbe obtained to find out what the interpersonal functions of hedges in newscommentary.The study adopts the research methods used in Corpus. The authors established acorpus composed by two sub-corpora—The New York Times and China Daily. Thenews comments are selected from the second half year of2010to the first half year of2011, are mainly about the international and domestic hot commentaries. There are30commentaries from The New York Times and30from China Daily. Choosing the twonewspapers as the source of the corpus is based on their authority. In order to ensurethe representativeness of the selected articles, the category of the article is mainly onthe political aspect.According to the research objectives mentioned above, this study proposes fiveresearch questions:1. As a special discourse and genre, news commentary requires precise andexplicit language, what is the frequency of hedges used in it?2. Are hedges distributed across the rhetorical structure of genre?3. What are the distributions of hedges across different sections? 4. Are there any differences in the usage of hedges between the twonewspapers?5. What are the interpersonal functions realized by the hedges?The data analysis takes quantitative and qualitative method. According to thestatistics and calculations by Word and Excel, the number and percentage of hedgeswill be gained, and the data will be visualized by charts and figures. And thenanalyzing the meaning and function of each word in a specific discourse will beconducted.In support of the above theoretical framework, this paper attempts to confirm theimportance of the presence of hedge in the discourse of news commentary, as well asto detect the similarities and differences between Chinese and American English newscommentary when using edges. The found results are:1. As expected, the hedges do exist in news commentary with a certain amounteven though the news commentary requires preciseness and objectivity. Inthe whole corpus, hedges appear509times totally among27464words,accounting for the percentage of18.53‰.2. It is observed that hedges are distributed according to the structure of newscommentary. Among the three parts of news commentary, the conclusion partaccounts for the highest proportion of hedges–27.50‰, the body part ranksthe second–18.64‰, and the introduction part–12.82‰respectively. It isaccordance with the feature of news commentary. In the conclusion of newscommentary, writers need to conclude the whole events, give reasonablejudgments, and also make predictions and conjectures. Thus hedges are usedin the conclusion part more than that in the other two parts.3. There are differences of hedges used in two subcorpora. Generally, thehedges used in The New York Times are more than that in China Daily. Oneof the major reasons for this is that ideology is the determinant factor.4. The interpersonal functions of hedges in news commentary:1). Hedging strategy is a politeness strategy, which helps to enhance politeness.Usually, the writers will draw conclusion which may be hedged in which the author cautiously avoids giving a direct and strong commitment to a position or point of view.The writer may prefer to state something indirectly. The writer might simply wish tosuggest an observation or point as likelihood.2). It helps to remove the responsibility about what the author stated. It is theinnate desire that human beings are trying to protect themselves and ensure theirsafety. On the one hand, the writers try to present the truth as precisely andobjectively as possible. On the other hand, the writers are not omniscience; it isdifficult for them always to get the correct information and make the satisfiedcomments. Pragmatic vagueness is employed in news reporting to enhanceself-protecting.3). Enhancing Creditability. The comment writers try to avoid makingcategorical and strong emotional words, because absolute and arrogant words mayarouse the reader‘s strong dislike and suspect. Hedges are used to alleviate thiscondition. For doing so, it is easy for readers to accept mild opinions and views.In addition, it should be pointed out that ideology is an important factor thataffects the use of hedges in news commentary of China and America, for ideologyand language are closely related.From a theoretical point of view, I hope that this research can enrich theapplication of systemic-function grammar in discourse analysis and also provide areference for a number of related researches.From a practical perspective, it hopes that it will benefit newspapermen andarouse their attention to hedges and proper use of hedges. Also, it is expected that itcan provide some constructive suggestions for English learning. |
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