| Since Lakoff (1972) first proposes the term for depicting "words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy", the study of hedges or hedging has been a subject of upsurging interest to scholars from various disciplines. However, a review of the previous studies concerning hedges has revealed that the concept of hedges has received most attraction within the scope of discourse analysis, of which genres include advertisement, inaugural texts, news reports, academic and scientific writings, etc. Little work has been carried out in the research of hedges in TV interview setting from the linguistic angle. The present thesis attempts to describe and discuss the use of hedges or hedging in the TV interview--Dialogue under the Adaptation Theory by Verschueren. According to the Adaptation Theory, language use is a continuous process of choice-making. In communication, interlocutors make choices of hedges to achieve their communicative needs. In the process of choice-making, language users have to adapt to the context. Thus, the choices of hedges or hedging in the TV interview are the result of adaptation to the context, namely, adaptation to the physical world, including time and space; adaptation to the mental world, including both the host’s and the guest’s; adaptation to the social world, including the social conventions and the social status of the communicators.Through an qualitative-oriented analysis of the adaptability of the hedges in the TV interview--Dialogue based on the data collected, the present thesis extends to figure out that1) hedges, as a type of meta-language, are used to modify and process fuzzy language;2) although hedges can be used to realize pragmatic vagueness, they are principally linguistic manifestations of speakers’meta-pragmatic awareness for the efficiency of communication;3) hedges are mainly employed to approximate the objective world, with a view to representing preciseness and truthfulness to the highest degree. |
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