A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In Grossover

Both preciseness and vagueness play vital important role in daily communications. Hedges,as an essential part of language, lead to pragmatic vagueness to a large extent. Lots of researcheshave been conducted on hedges and have made great progress in hedges studies. Actually, lots ofwords, phrases and even clauses are considered to be hedges for their irreplaceable uniquesemantic features and pragmatic functions.Actually, hedges are also applied in English programs made in China by both the host andthe guests. As a representative program that takes English as the language carrier on the mostauthentic CCTV, Crossover is a well known program which impresses the audiences with itsabundant topics and fluent English.The present study adopts ten randomly selected editions to construct the corpus. Qualitativeand quantitative methods are adopted to analyze the employment of hedges in Crossover,including the realizations of hedges, in another word, the reclassification. The analysis isconducted from the pragmatic perspective, hoping to provide a case study for hedges researchesand improve people’s communication strategies.The findings could be illustrated as follows:First of all, this paper reclassifies the hedges in Crossover on the foundation of Prince etal.’s classification and with the consideration of other scholars’ contributions. It is found thatadaptors, rounders, plausible shields, attribution shields and other shields including somepragmatic markers, passive voice, there be clauses, if clauses and confirmative questions areadopted as hedges in this paper.Secondly, the hedges analysis is conducted within the theoretical framework. The studyshows that some hedges are to obey the maxims in Cooperative, while some are to violate them.Some of the violations are out of consideration for other maxims in Cooperative Principle whileothers are out of the consideration of Politeness Principle. The six maxims of PolitenessPrinciple are not equivalently employed in the programs. The agreement maxim is the mostnotable while the other maxims rarely employed maybe for the program mainly focuses on thesocial hot topics rather than personal affairs.Last but not the least, based on the pragmatic analysis of hedges within the theoreticalframework, this paper summarizes the main pragmatic functions of hedges in Crossover, namely,protecting oneself, being more polite, increasing credibility, enhancing the flexibility of language,creating a harmonious communication atmosphere.