Contrastive Study Of Hedges In Chinese And American Political Discourse Based On Adaptation Theory

Fuzziness, as one of the natural features of human language, like exactness, plays an important role in linguistic communication. Hedges, as one of the presentations of fuzziness pervade in various linguistic phenomena. If employed appropriately, hedges can make great contribution to linguistic communication. American linguist Lakoff initially proposed the notion "Hedge" in1972. From then on, Fraser, Brown&Levinson, Leech, Hubler, Myers and other linguists further studied hedges. At home, Professor Wu Tieping first introduced hedges into China in the late1970s. Afterwards, a great number of scholars in China conducted in-depth researches of fuzziness and hedges from various angles. In the beginning, the researches on hegdes are confined to the level of semantics and syntax. In recent years, an increasing number of scholars make researches of hedges from pragmatic and discourse analysis angles. It is undoubted that fruitful results of hedges study have been gained. However, there still exists divergence in many aspects. The hedges study especially in some specific genres (like politics, laws, and business texts) is relatively in a small amount. And it hasn’t reached a common consensus.Human society cannot exist without politics. It is related to all aspects of social life. Hedges play an important part in political discourse. Thereby, more researches concerning this field are carried out. However, the researches on the contrastive study between Chinese political discourse (CPD) and American political discourse (APD) are inadequate. Therefore, based on previous researches, according to G Lakoff’s definition of hedges, Prince et al.’s classification and Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory, this thesis aims to focus on the contrastive study of hedges between CPD and APD in order to clarify the similarities and differences of hedges appiled in CPD and APD, reveal the characteristics of hedges applied in CPD and APD and find out the reasons for the existence of hedges in CPD and APD under the framework of Adaptation Theory, hoping that it can bring some inspiration to related researches. In order to realize these purposes, the whole thesis is conducted under the following two questions:1.what are the similarities and differences in the frequency and the distribution of four types of hedges employed in CPD and APD?2. How does the Adaptation Theory interpret the existence of hedges in CPD and APD?In order to discuss the above questions, the writer establishes two small-scale paralleled corpora, in which all the data are collected from influential political websites in China and American-http://www.fnprc.gov.cn, http://www.people.com.cn, http://www.state.gov.and http://www.whitehouse.gov.To ensure the comprehensiveness and objectiveness of the contrastive study, the writer categorizes the data into five groups, concerning various subjects and occasions to the largest extent. Each corpus contains9articles, with the total word number of28890in Chinese and the total word number of25552in American respectively. According to Lakoff’s definition and Prince et al.’s classification of hedges, with the help of search function of word file, the software AntConc and on scrutiny of the context, the writer identifies and calculates the number and frequency of the four types of hedges in CPD and APD. Through the above collected data, the writer carries out qualitative, quantitative and descriptive analysis of hedges and discusses the similarities and differences of hedges in two corpora. The four types of hedges are commonly occurring in CPD and APD. However, the overall percentage of hedges in each corpus is a bit different, occupying1.50%,2.16%respectively. Besides, there exist different preferences of the four types of hedges in CPD and APD. The most frequently used hedges in CPD are adaptors; while the most frequently used hedges in APD are rounders. Afterwards, in the framework of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the writer analyzes and expounds the existence of hedges in CPD and APD, which proves out to be the result of the adaptations to the physical world, the social world as well as the mental world.