Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In English News

It is not possible for people to express thoughts completely only by language, so they of-ten utilize vague language to achieve the success and harmony of communication. Vagueness is the significant characteristics of process of thought, which has deeply penetrated into our daily life, especially in the English news whose language needs to be accurate.American computer scientists, mathematicians Lofti A Zedeh published A book of Fuzzy Set Theory creating the vague mathematics in the early1960s, which provides a new way for the research of natural science. In addition to using some precise method, people started apply-ing new methods from different angle to analyze various language phenomenon, and then vague linguistics is created. Professor Wu Tieping in our country firstly explained the vague things in his Vague Language. That is to say, language system allows the speaker express thought under the condition of uncertainty about the truth of facts. He agrees with Fuzzy Set Theory by Zedeh and introduces the vague language from different angles such as concept of vague word and the hedges in the process of communication. He classified the hedges from perspective of grammar and then a lot of linguists focus on research of hedges. As one member of vauge language,’Hedges’draw attention of a few linguists and it first appeared in A study in A fancy Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concept by linguist Lakoff which refers to words in which people who want to make things vague purposely. And then he also gives a speech called Hedges and Meaning Criteria in which he further studies the vagueness of language. Some experts and scholars in our country began to combine with vague linguistics and prag-matics, and have pragmatic analysis of vague language style. Linguist He Ziran (1987) in China classified the hedges from perspective of semantic and pointed out the application of hedges in verbal communication and its pragmatic function based on speech act and its ac-curred condition. What’s more, he analyzed the hedges according to the truth value condition of speech act and concluded the use of hedges can not weaken the accuracy of discourse but convey information more properly and accurately.There are some applications of hedges in news reports which demand the accuracy of lan-guage which must conform to the objective facts, but people will mistakenly think this accu-racy can only be expressed by exact words. But just in the news (either radio or written news), there are a lot of hedges such as ’recently’ and ’about’ and so on. A lot of linguists at home and abroad study the features, classification and functions of hedge, but its application and analysis in English news is not so much, the kind of study should be focused on. When readers run into the hedges in English news, they may doubt whether the presence of hedges will weaken the authenticity of the news or not, whether vagueness and accuracy can exist in news reports to- gether or not, whether readers can accept hedges in English news or not are important prob-lems which need to be studied at this stage. So this thesis reviews the previous studies of hedge and based on them, within the frameworks of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, adopting the method of theory explanation and example analysis to explore the pragmatic func-tions of hedge in news reports. By researching in a certain extent, it is accepted that the appli-cation of hedge does not go against the above two principles, if the use of hedges violates one of maxims in CP or PP, it must follow another one. Through collecting a lot of news parts, this thesis deeply discusses the pragmatic function of hedge based on previous study from grammar, words forms and sentence structures in order to comprehensively master hedge in news writing. The thesis finally aim to further illustrate the hedges in English news does not contradicts with the accuracy of news in the process of transferring information, and make readers understand the application of hedges in news is reasonable and has its own special pragmatic function.The thesis includes six chapters. Firstly, this paper overall presents the background of study on hedges, the purpose and significance of researching hedge in English news. Secondly, previous studies of hedge at home or abroad will be presented, meanwhile it will review the hedge including its definition and classification. The third chapter presents the theoretical framework of the thesis. Chapter four is the core section of this thesis, through a large number of news parts which are collected from different media and read carefully, we found there are a lot of hedges which present in news from grammar, words forms and sentence structures. And the application of hedges are accordance with CP and PP. Based on that, the pragmatic function of hedges will be deeply studied. The fifth chapter analyzes and summarizes the pragmatic function in news from perspective of pragmatic and news characteristics, and then we find that the research of hedges in news can have enlightenment to other fields such as Advertising Eng-lish, Business English and English Teaching. The last chapter summarizes the main findings of this thesis, putting forward the research limitations and the problems to be studied in the future. Through the study above, journalists can be more objective and accurate to convey information aiming to embody news value and the research of hedges in news laid a foundation for study-ing further.