A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In Family Album, USA

Hedge is an important part of fuzzy language. It is a common phenomenon and plays avital role in verbal communication. Since Lakoff proposed the concept of hedges in1972, ithas entered into various linguistic fields and captured many scholars’ attention. They doresearches on hedges from a variety of angles. It is generally believed that a good use oflanguage should be brief, clear and precise, while vagueness, imprecision and ambiguityshould be avoided. However, vagueness and imprecision are very common in everydayconversation because of the lack of conscious planning, which is embodied in the highfrequency of hesitations, repetitions and pauses. Useful insights obtained from the literaturereview conclude that since more scholars pay attention to the studies of hedges in writtendiscourse, investigations of hedges in spoken discourse of specific genres are the areas thatneed more attention.The present study chooses the popular teaching course book, Family Album, USA as the dataresource and mainly analyzes hedges from pragmatic perspective under the theoreticalframework of Relevance Theory. First, the paper begins with the research rationale,significance, research methods and the introduction of the data resource. Then, the paperreviews the research fruits of foreign and domestic scholars in recent decades. In ChapterThree, the theoretical framework of the present paper, Sperber and Wilson’s RelevanceTheory, is described and illustrated clearly accompanied with specific examples. ChapterFour is the main part of the paper. On the basis of data resources in Family Album, USA, thespecific examples are discussed from the pragmatic perspective. Meanwhile, statistics aboutthe frequency of the hedges in Family Album, USA is also listed. The language in dialogue is atypical communicative pattern and the analysis of which is helpful to understand more abouthedges in daily communication. At last, the author summarizes the limitations of the paperand study, and puts forward suggestions for further explorations.