| Hedges is a kind of expression of Fuzzy language, and exists widely in verbalcommunication. The notion of hedges was firstly introduced by a famous American linguistGeorge Lakoff who defines hedges as “words whose job is to make things fuzzier” in1972.Under the guidance of Lakoff’s research, some linguists like Hyland (1994,1995,1998),Prince et al.(1982), Wu Tieping (1979,1997,1999), and He Ziran (1985,1998,2003) havestudied hedges from various perspectives, and the theoretical studies of hedges mainly focuson the classification of hedges. Different sorts of classifications of hedges have been proposedby different linguists both at home and abroad. It is found that the classification of hedgesproposed by Prince et al.(1982) is one of the most accepted one in the related field. Theyclassified hedges into two groups: approximators and shields. Approximators can avoid beingarbitrary and make the utterance objective. They are further divided into two subtypes:adaptors and rounders. Shields, on the other hand, do not change the truth-conditions of theprepositional content but reflect the degree of the speaker’s commitment to the truth-value ofthe proposition conveyed, and directly express the speaker’s guesswork or doubtful attitude toan utterance. They can also be divided into two subtypes: plausibility shields and attributionshields. Prince et al.’s classification is relatively mature and suitable for both English hedgesand Chinese hedges.This paper firstly makes a literature review of hedges including definitions andclassifications proposed by different linguists both at home and abroad, and introduces somerelated studies of hedges from the aspects of semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis.Most of the previous studies on hedges focus on the development of theories while very fewresearchers study hedges through some cases in a practical way. Currently, hedges still remaina comparatively new topic for Chinese linguists, and related studies of hedges in China havenot been done systematically, even fewer has been conducted in the comparative analysis ofhedges between English and Chinese. Thus the English subtitle of an American movie ForrestGump and the subtitle of its Chinese dubbed version were selected as the research data of thisstudy. On the basis of Prince et al.’s (1982) classification of hedges, both qualitative andcomparison analysis were done to portray the features of the hedges in the English and theChinese subtitle in order to answer the research questions: What are the distributions andfeatures of hedges respectively in the English subtitle and the Chinese subtitle of the selectedmovie? Does each hedge in the English subtitle tend to have its counterpart in the Chinese one?Why or why not?The results show that hedges are applied both in the English and the Chinese subtitles,and the frequency of the employment of hedges in the English data is slightly higher than that of hedges in the Chinese one. Furthermore, the proportions of four hedges in English andChinese corpora are quite similar: adaptors account for the largest percentage, followed byplausibility shields, attribution shields, and rounders in sequence both in the English and theChinese subtitle. However, there also exist differences of hedges between the two corpora.One-to-one correspondence between hedges in the English subtitle and those in the Chinesesubtitle is not rigidly followed, and some hedges are missing in both subtitles. The reasons ofthese differences lie in the context, conversational habits, cultural diversity, the characteristicsof movie script writing, strategies of subtitle translating, and other factors. The present studycan be of help to further comparative studies of the employment of hedges between Englishand Chinese, and is hoped to have implication for EFL acquisition and movie languagetranslation. |
PDF Full Text Request