| It is well known that language not only has a certain degree of accuracy and fuzziness, the fuzziness is asnatural as one of the intrinsic characteristics of the language itself as well as accuracy. However, it was notuntil1965when American scientist L.A. Zadeh proposed “Fuzzy Set” in the journal of Information andControl that it began to draw attention and interest. In previous studies, it is found that hedges are majorfuzzy language in human natural language. Vague language, as an important part of hedges, plays animportant role in both verbal and written language communication. Political news report is a window forpeople to understand the political events, so the usage of hedges in political news report is worth a deepstudy in an important area.According to domestic and foreign study on hedges, this paper intends to make a systematic contrastiveanalysis on hedges from Politeness principle, Face-saving theory and Interpersonal function of pragmatictheory in Chinese and English political news reports. In this study, hedges in political news reports are thestudy object. According to the classification on hedges of E.F.Prince (1982), contrastive study is madebetween hedges in Chinese and English political news reports, combined with quantitative and qualitativeanalysis. This article extracts24pieces of political news (in total27,202) randomly as research data fromReuters official website, Reuters official Chinese website and Financial Times official Chinese website.With regard to research purposes, there main issues are put forward in this study. Firstly, what are thedifferences and similarities of frequency and distribution on hedges in political news reports? Secondly,what are the potential causes of the similarities and differences? Finally, what are the realizations ofachieving the interpersonal function?This study is mainly composed of the following five parts:Chapter One is mainly about overall summary of research. In this chapter, research background, researchobjectives, significance of research and the structure of organization are expounded respectively.Chapter Two is mainly about literature review, in which the discussion and overview of study on hedgesat home and abroad are discussed in details.Chapter Three is about research design, in which research questions data collection, research methods and steps are included. In addition, this chapter presents the working definition of hedges and classificationof hedges.The fourth chapter is the core part of this study. Firstly, according to Hyland and Prince, the hedges inpolitical news reports are discovered and divided into different types and then the amount and frequency ofusage on hedges are shown in form to make further study. Secondly, the usage of hedges in political newsreports is explained through examples, finally the pragmatic functions of hedges are discussed.The fifth chapter is the conclusion part, in which are presented the summary of the major findings of thestudy and the implications of the research. In addition, the limitations of this study are also provided andthen some suggestions are given for the future study.All in all, a great number of hedges exist in political news reports. Hedges, as a communication strategyor objective, have been widely used by politicians and news media to achieve specific pragmatic functions.This study is helpful to understand fully the hedges in political news reports, and also play a great role inteaching English. |
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