The Interpersonal Function By Hedges In English Hard News From The Perspective Of Appraisal Theory

News is a specialized context, and hard news is an important type of it. News，especially hard news should be objective without bias when news reporters reportnews events and issues to the public. This requires that news reporters not onlyfulfill the purpose of “informing” and “spreading” of news, but also handle thecomplex relationships with each other. The application of hedges in hard news canshow different interpersonal functions.With the guide of the framework of J.R. Martin’s Appraisal Theory, this thesisaims at making a research of hedges and attempts to discover the characteristic ofdistribution of the hedges as appraisal resources used in the English hard news writtenby Chinese news reporters. This thesis collects36pieces of English hard news fromthe mainstream newspapers website: China Daily (http://www. chinadaily. com.cn/hqzx/) to form the self—established corpus.The result shows that the hedges are as abundant as graduation resources andengagement resources in English hard news. The number of hedges as graduationresources outnumbers that of engagement resources, and they convey differentinterpersonal functions. By the use of hedges as graduation resources, news reporterscan not only express their own stances and attitudes about the propositions, but alsoeither reinforce the interpersonal strength of the items they modified to greatlyconvince the readers, or mitigate the force of the items to make it less absolute andmore acceptable to the readers. Through the use of hedges as engagement resources,news reporters intend to indicate that they do recognize the co—existence ofalternative views and they are willing to negotiate with external voices to establishalignment with readers and harmonize the relationship. Apart from the results of thisresearch，this thesis aims to bring enlightenment to news reporters and readers. Newsreporters and readers should raise their abilities of employing and comprehendinghedges in real contexts; and news translators should explore implications behindliteral meanings，attaining similar reactions in target language readers.