A Pragmatic And Contrastive Study Of Hedges In English Cover Letters By Chinese EFL Learners And English Native Speakers

In1965, L. A. Zadeh proposed “Fuzzy Set” and introduced it to the field of linguistics. Hedges arecommon phenomenon in language learning and application. As the major part of vagueness language,hedges are considered as the most common, typical and valuable vague language. Plenty of scholars haveconducted researches on the classification, features, pragmatic features of hedges and their application inwritten and oral materials. Recently, studies on hedges are chiefly found in news tests, advertisinglanguages and political interviews, but few researches are conducted on hedges in English cover letters, tosay nothing of the studies in terms of the comparison between English and Chinese.This research collects thirty English cover letters written by EFL learners and thirty English coverletters composed by English native speakers. Based on the classifications of E. P. Prince（1982）, this studyaims to work out the frequency and distribution of hedges by means of the contrastive analysis of theEnglish cover letters by Chinese EFL learners and English native speaker. What is more, this studyanalyzes the pragmatic functions of hedges on the basis of co-operative principles and politeness principles.This study aims to solve the following three questions:(1) What are the classification, linguistic realization,similarities and differences of hedges in ECL by English native speakers and ECL by Chinese EFL learners?(2)What are the similarities and differences of hedges in ECL by English native speakers and ECL byChinese EFL learners from the pragmatic perspective and what are the causes for these differences?(3)What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in ECL by English native speakers and ECL by ChineseEFL learners?Findings illustrate that hedges are frequently adopted in ECL by English native speakers and ECL byChinese EFL learners among which adaptors are the most favored with rounders sequencing the secondplace. Attribution shields are frequently adopted by the Chinese EFL learners while plausibility shieldsoccur frequently in English cover letters by the English native speakers. Hedges are applied in CP and PP,yet, EFL learners are less skilled than English native speakers in the adoption of CP and PP. The causes forthe differences include: relatively poor language competence, low awareness of hedges and CP and PP,different thinking mode between the east and west culture. Moreover, this research generalizes the pragmatic functions of hedges in English cover letters as well.This research is made up of five chapters.Chapter One is the introduction of the present study, which provides the research background,research significance, research objectives and organization of the thesis.Chapter Two is chiefly concerned with the literature review, which includes the definition and featuresof cover letters and hedges, the previous research of hedges at home and abroad, the classification ofhedges and the pragmatic theories related to the present study.Chapter Three is the research design, which mainly deals with the research questions, material source,data selection, research methodology and research procedures.Chapter Four is the main part of the whole research, which studies the frequency and distribution ofhedges in English cover letters by English native speakers and English cover letters by Chinese EFLlearners, as well as analyzes the pragmatic strategies employed by presenting some examples. Moreover, inthis chapter, the causes for the differences and pragmatic functions of hedges are summarized with theillustration of some instances.Chapter Five is the part of conclusion, which first of all summarizes the main findings of this study,and then presents the implications. In addition, this chapter also points out the limitations of this research,and provides some suggestions for further research in the future.