A Contrastive Study Of Use Of Hedges In English And Chinese Economic News Reports

The thesis, based on the corpus of economic news written by native speakers ofEnglish (EM corpus), Chinese-authored English economic news corpus (CE corpus)and Chinese economic news corpus (CC corpus), is a contrastive study on the use ofhedges in the three corpora and each corpus consists of forty news reports respectively.Specifically, based on Hyland’s (1998) classification of hedges, this paper studies thesimilarities and differences in overall number, frequency and distribution of differenttypes of hedges in economic news written by native speakers of English,Chinese-authored English economic news and Chinese economic news and exploresthe reasons for the use of hedges in economic news reports, pragmatic functions ofhedges and underlying reasons for the similarities and differences in use of hedges.Hedges generally refer to such terms as I think, likely, may, ect. which helpexpress tentativeness or uncertainty towards assertions, mitigate commitment topropositions and distance writers from the claims made. Previous studies havefocused on use of hedges in scientific academic writing (Hyland1998, etc). Drawingon previous studies, this paper probes into the use of hedges in Chinese and Englisheconomic news, which is a under-investigated area of research.The study shows some similarities in use of hedges, but considerable differencesare also shown in the overall number, frequency and distribution of different types ofhedges. For instance, the frequency of use of hedges in the corpus of Englisheconomic news written by Chinese and corpus of Chinese economic news is lowerthan that in the corpus of English economic news written by native speakers ofEnglish. Furthermore, the study finds that the reasons why economic news reportersuse hedges are to meet requirements of timeliness and accuracy of news reports, toindicate information source so as to avoid responsibility, to avoid absoluteness andallow for competing views, to tailor to cognitive needs of readers and to catch readers’attention. The pragmatic functions of hedges are mainly to show that reporters areaware of the maxims of Cooperative Principle and needs of negative politeness strategy. The differences found are interpreted with respect to different Englishproficiency levels between English reporters and Chinese reporters and cultural andlinguistic differences and differences in journalistic values between English andChinese reporters.