A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In Desperate Housewives

As one of inherent and pervasive features of natural language, fuzziness mainlyembodies in fuzzy language. Hedges are an important part of fuzzy language, which playsa vital role in our daily communication. Since Lakoff proposed the concept of hedges in1972, it has attracted many scholars’ wide attention from various linguistic fields,involving semantics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, social linguistics, second languageacquisition, translation, styles, rhetoric, cognitive psychology and cross-culturalcommunication, etc. However, useful insights obtained from the literature review concludethat many scholars pay more attention to the studies of hedges in written discourse, whileinvestigations of hedges in spoken discourse of specific genres still exist in some shortage.The author chooses the American TV series Desperate Housewives whose characteristicmainly revolves around the oral language as the corpus, based on the CooperativePrinciple, Politeness Principle, and Speech Act theory, and tries to systematically analyzethe use of hedges from the perspective of pragmatics, in order to enlarge the researchscope of hedges in spoken language, as well as represent its pragmatic value.In this paper, the hedges which appear in the selective30examples from DesperateHousewives will be classified mainly on a basis of Prince, Frader and Bosk’s classification(1982). The thesis, by adopting qualitative method as the main research method, based ontheoretical framework of pragmatics, attempts to make a systematical analysis of the useof four kinds of hedges: adaptors, rounders, plausibility shields and attribution shields, andto explore what kinds of speech acts that the different hedges perform by violating orobserving the maxims of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. The dissertationtries to resolve the following issues:(1) Under what kinds of situations are differenthedges used by communicators in Desperate Housewives?(2) How do the communicatorsuse different kinds of hedges to achieve the specific communicative purposes in DesperateHousewives?(3) What are the pragmatic functions that hedges perform in DesperateHousewives, including positive functions and negative functions?This research finds that:(1) In daily verbal communication of Desperate Housewives, hedges usually occur in those sensitive topics, or on those communicative occasions, inwhich the speaker tries to avoid or shift his/her own responsibility, or in which make thehearer feel uncomfortable or unfavorable.(2) In the process of pragmatic analysis, it isfound that, generally, the use of hedges in Desperate Housewives violates the maxims ofCP, or obeys the maxims of PP, so as to perform some specific speech acts, that is to say,to achieve the communicative goals.(3) The research explores nine sorts of positivefunctions of hedges used in1-2seasons of Desperate Housewives, including as a functionto mitigate face-threats; to hide the truth; to provide the effective information; to smooththe conversation; to persuade people; to comfort people’s emotion; to avoid or shiftresponsibility; to express euphemism; and to show politeness. Instead, from the process ofanalysis, we also notice that the negative effects of hedges. If hedges are used excessivelyor inappropriately, communicators may deliver wrong messages by making mistakes sothat generate some negative functions of hedges, involving: leading to the pragmaticmisunderstanding; causing the prolixity, disorder and obscurity of language; resulting inthe pragmatic failure of communication. Consequently, the communicators should masterthe proper limits for speech, as well as appropriately apply the pragmatic functions ofhedges, so that they can attain specific communicative purposes, which is also essentialfor English learners and educators. The author hopes that the results of this study will beof some help in broadening the study of hedging in the perspective of pragmatics,enhancing the hedging awareness of understanding of English learners and their ability ofapplying hedges, and providing valuable theoretical foundations for the study on thehedges used in spoken style.