Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In A Dream Of Red Mansion

Working on the fuzziness of language, Lakoff defined some words "whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy" as hedges in1972. Hedges are commonly used in daily life. Since it was put forward, hedges have been widely discussed from grammatical, semantic and pragmatic perspectives. Although applied to numerous fields, little work has been done to analyze hedges in a literature work.Reaching on the universal communicative mechanism, Paul Grice put forward the famous Cooperative Principle in1967, which is widely applied to analyzing utterances in daily life and literary works. Cooperative Principle contains four maxims, which are quality maxim, quantity maxim, relation maxim, and manner maxim.Considered as a masterpiece of Chinese literature, A Dream of Red Mansions has been researched by a great quantity of scholars from various perspectives. Although considerable researches have been made on A Dream of Red Mansions, seldom researches had been done to study the hedges in this novel. Also considered as an encyclopedia of the feudal society, A Dream of Red Mansions contains abundant hedges in utterances. By analyzing the hedges in A Dream of Red Mansions, the personality of the characters will be understood better, and also the ability of appreciating literature work will be improved.