A Contrastive Analysis Of Hedges In English News From Chinese And American Newspapers

The present thesis is a corpus-based contrastive analysis of hedges in English news reportswritten by American and Chinese reporters. This research is conducted on the basis of twoself-constructed corpora. The objective of this research is mainly to find out the similarities anddifferences between the using of hedges in English news reports written by American and Chinesenews reporters and illustrate the hedging phenomenon in English news reports by LinguisticAdaptation Theory.According to the classification of hedges by Prince et al, this research concentrates on twoself-constructed corpora and carries out quantitative and qualitative analysis of hedges employedin the two corpora. In the present thesis, hedges can be categorized into approximators and shields.Then approximators can be sub-divided into adaptors and rounders. Shields can be sub-dividedinto plausibility shields and attribution shields. The two corpora are constructed by randomlyselecting news reports from China Daily and New York Times and are named as CN and ANrespectively. There are three research questions designed in the present research:1) What are thecharacteristics of hedges used in CN and AN? What are the similarities and differences betweenCN and AN?2) What are the potential reasons for using hedges in English news reports from theperspective of Adaptation Theory?3) What are the major pragmatic functions of hedges in Englishnews reports? It is necessary to use several research tools, mainly PowerGrep and AntConc, toanswer the above questions.In the present research, in order to guarantee the reliability of data collection, PowerGrep is applied to find out the frequency of each sub-category of hedges in two corpora. Since someretrieval words and expressions do not serve as hedges under certain circumstances, AntConc isapplied to retrieve each hedge in the process of data identification. After close manualexamination of concordance lines, those concordance lines in which the retrieval words andexpressions do not serve as hedges will be excluded to ensure the credibility and validity of thedata.After the quantitative and qualitative analysis of data, it can be found that the existence ofhedges in two corpora is pervasive. The overall percentages of hedges in two corpora are close toeach other. However, the comparison of normalized frequency of hedges in two corpora showsthat the specific employment of each sub-category is significantly different. In the comparison ofthe two broader-categories of hedges, the two corpora show an obvious similarity–there are moreshields than approximators in both corpora. However, in the comparison of the four sub-categories,the two corpora show a significant difference. The most frequently used type of hedges in CN isrounders. However, attribution shields is particularly favored by AN. What’s more, there is no bigdifference between the frequency of plausibility shields and attribution shields in CN. However, inAN, attribution shields are most frequently used and plausibility shields are seldom used.After summarizing the characteristics of hedges in CN and AN, the author attempts toillustrate the potential reason of using hedges in English news reports and the similarities anddifferences between two corpora. Apart from the direct research results, this thesis also shedssome light on related studies. Student who major in English news reporting and writing shouldraise their awareness in comprehending and employing hedges in real news texts so as to improvetheir ability of using hedges appropriately.