An Analysis Of Hedges’ Pragmatic Functions In English Advertisements

Hedge is one of the main manifestations of language vagueness. Hedges as animportant part of the fuzzy language have been widely applied to the commercialinteractions. In1972, Lakoff firstly proposed the hedges’ definition. The research ofhedges from the perspective of semantics began since then. With the development ofeconomic globalization, advertisements, as an effective communicative media, receivemore and more attention in modern society. The merchants take advertisements as animportant promoting strategy in commercial activities while the consumers may get abetter understanding of the goods through the advertisements. Therefore, the role ofadvertisements has become more and more important for people in daily life. It can beeasily found that there are many vague expressions in the advertising language.Despite the fact that the research direction of hedges has been shifted from semanticapproach to pragmatic approach in recent years, the research of hedges’ pragmaticfunctions in advertisements is relatively few.Qualitative and quantitative approach are applied in the process of the study.English advertisements are collected from two original English magazines includingVanity Fair and Better Homes and Gardens. Besides English magazines, somewell-known English websites have also become the data base of the research. Firstly,hedges collected from the English advertisements are classified into different typesbased on Prince’s classification, which is the process of qualitative analysis. Secondly,it is explored that how frequently hedges are used in English advertisements. Thirdly,according to the linguistic features of advertising English, hedges’ pragmaticfunctions in English advertisements are explored from the perspective of Cooperativeprinciple, Politeness principle and Adaptation theory.In the corpus formed by hedges from these selected English advertisements, thefrequency of approximators is relatively higher than shields. Rounders is the most frequently used hedges in English advertisements. Adaptors rank second among thesefour types of hedges. Plausibility and attribution shields are seldom used in theseselected English advertisements. According to the four maxims of Cooperativeprinciple, the copywriters should design advertisements which are informative,relevant and clear. While through the research of hedges in these selected Englishadvertisements, it has been found that the advertisers tend to violate intentionally themaxims of Cooperative principle by using hedges so as to attract more consumers’attention. On the contrary, the copywriters often conform to the maxims of Politenessprinciple. They tend to show respect to the consumers through advertisements. Basedon Adaptation theory, the copywriters need to make language choices continuously inthe process of designing advertisements. The copywriters adapt to the targetedconsumers’ mental world, social world and physical world by using hedges inadvertisements. The pragmatic functions of hedges in English advertisements can besummarized as the following four points:(1) enhancing the credibility and objectivityof the advertisements;(2) avoiding being too absolute;(3) heightening theadvertisements’ attractiveness.(4) Strengthening advertisements’ persuasion.The research of hedges in English advertisements can play a positive role inhelping the merchants use hedging strategy properly, which can play a very importantrole in international trade. At the same time, the research of hedges in advertisementsis also enriched. The research also contributes to the study of advertisements andpragmatics. However, due to the limitation of research time, the quantity and types ofadvertisements are still inadequate. There is still some research area without beingtouched in the thesis. First, the data base of the research can be formed by Chineseand English advertisements so as to do a comparative study of hedges in Chinese andEnglish advertisements. Second, other types of fuzzy language may become theresearch object which is helpful to gain a more comprehensive understanding ofhedging strategy in advertisements.