An Analysis On The Pragmatic Functions Of Hedges In Chinese Conflict Talks

In language communication, people out of different communicative purposessometimes prefer fuzzy language to convey their attitudes and ideas. Hedges arewidely used as a communication strategy to achieve different communicative goals,owing to hedges’ significant and unique features which can make utterance objective,proper, polite and maintain a good interpersonal relationship between speakers.1970’s witnessed the fruitful studies of hedges from the perspectives of semantics andlogics. While from1980’s, an increasing number of scholars began to study hedgesfrom the viewpoint of pragmatics with the growing influence of pragmatic research.There are many literatures on hedges from the perspective of pragmatics, such as theinvestigations of hedges in doctor-patient conversations, in English news, in publicspeech and in business negotiation etc. However, the intensive research of hedges inChinese conflict talks is still relatively rare.The present thesis aims to analyze the hedges in Chinese conflict talks andinvestigate their pragmatic functions. The data are collected from a talk show namedTiger Talk in which conflicts frequently happen. With Prince et al.’s classification ofhedges, the conversations in40episodes of Tiger Talk that contain hedges areidentified, recorded, counted and classified. Typical conversations with hedges arechosen and saved as examples to be analyzed in the thesis. At last, based on the mainbasic pragmatic theories of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, thepragmatic features and functions of hedges are explored and analyzed.Based on the researches above, it is found that hedges play a very important rolein achieving different conversation goals in Chinese conflict talks. They are used toprovide proper amount of information, to show self-protection, to achieve politenessand respect as well as to enhance objectivity and reliability. And these functions ofhedges make it possible for speakers to communicate flexibly and efficiently.Making an all-round and deep exploration of hedges in Chinese conflict talks notonly enriches the investigation of hedges but also promotes the development ofpragmatics and conflict talk.