A Study Of The Hedges In The TV Talk Show Intimate Talk With Li Jing

The main purpose of the dissertation is to probe into the pragmatic functions of thehedges in Chinese TV talk show Intimate Talk with Li Jing. Hedges, as one of the mostimportant and an inseparable part of fuzzy language, can be adopted both as a form and astrategy to realize different functions. In daily communication, it is an effective way to usehedges to express speakers’ uncertainty and hesitation, or to maintain or amend relationsamong people. Since the word hedge is put forward by G. Lakoff(1972), lots of scholars bothat home and abroad have devoted to this research field and abundant research findings havebeen achieved. According to the materials at hand, the study of hedges is mainly carried out insome specific fields, such as logic, semantics, discourse analysis, cognitive study, secondlanguage acquisition, pragmatics, etc. But concerning the pragmatics, the author finds thatresearchers both at home and abroad tend to investigate hedges within the framework ofCooperative Principle (CP), Politeness Principle (PP), Face Threatening Act (FTA) andRelevance Theory. Comparatively, the study of hedges within Adaptation Theory is relativelyfew. As one of the three theories of pragmatics and the perspective on language, AdaptationTheory put forward by Jef Verschuren possesses powerful force of explanation on languagephenomena and deserve more attention. What’s more, the study of hedges is primarilyconducted in some discourses, such as political discourse, scientific discourse, etc. Relatively,TV talk show, as a type of institutional discourse, is the field the study of hedges rarelytouches upon. Due to the two reasons, the author make attempts to probe into hedges withinthe framework of Adaptation Theory, to be exact, mainly from context correlates of adaptation,with the purpose of surveying the pragmatic functions of hedges in Chinese TV talk showIntimate Talk with Li Jing with the purpose of making people get a better understanding of the way of using hedges, promoting their pragmatic awareness of employing hedges and finallyachieving communicative needs.To better fulfill the requirements and achieve the purpose of the study, both quantitativeand qualitative methods are adopted. The present study is mainly conducted from two parts tosatisfy the purpose of the study. The first part is the subtle and detailed analysis of frequencyand distribution of hedges in Intimate Talk with Li Jing from the two different but interrelatedangles in order to make people better understand how the hedges in Intimate Talk with Li Jingare used in the process of adapting to the mental world, the social world and the physicalworld. In the second part, on the basis of the six episodes chosen at random, amounting about60,000Chinese characters as the corpus, the author makes a thorough description on thepragmatic functions of the hedges play in this TV talk show program within the AdaptationTheory. The survey reveals that: in this TV talk show program, the employment of the hedgesby both the hostess Li Jing and the distinguished guests are the result of constantly adapting tothe three worlds; and the pragmatic functions of the hedges play in Intimate Talk with Li Jingmainly include four aspects: creating exaggeration and understatement; provoking humor andself-mockery; protecting oneself; showing politeness (showing sympathy and modesty).The significance of the study lies in two aspects. Firstly, the present study may be ofsome help and value to make people get a better understanding of the adaptation of the hedgesin Intimate Talk with Li Jing and can be deemed as a guidance for the way of adopting hedgesas a communicative strategy to achieve communicative needs. What’s more, the present study,in a certain degree, is a great assistance for foreign learners to know more about Chinesehedges and Chinese culture, and promote cultural exchanges between countries.