| It is widely believed that vagueness, imprecision and general woolliness are to beavoided in the process of using language, because clarity and precision, believed bylanguage users, are two important aspects in language use. However, the phenomenon ofvagueness and vague language are so universal that they can be met everywhere in ourdaily life, such as in daily conversation, in textbooks, in news reports. It is used at variouslevels of language such as speech, sounds, words, sentences, discourses, and so on bypeople unconsciously. Actually, the existence and uses of vagueness contributes a lot toinformation exchange in language communication. As a kind of form of vague language,the jargon of hedges can be traced back to1972. G. Lakoff published his essay A Study inMeaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts. Hedges, as one effective way toexpress vagueness, often appear in finance and business reports.As a way of information exchange, news reporting, especially the news on the internet,has played a more and more important role in people’s daily life. News language has thequality and style of expressing facts, exchanging information, and it owns its languagecharacteristics. News language should be objective, precise, succinct, simple andcolloquial. However, hedges also exist in news reports normally. Thus, why could hedgesbe allowed to exist in the language of finance and business news reports? This paperanalyses the pragmatic function of hedges in English news reports on the basis ofcollection certain number of authentic data of English news reports by making use ofadaption theory of Verschueren. This study helps to deepen our understanding of hedgesand vague language in finance and business news reports. |
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