| Hedges are the words or phrases that are attached to other utterance. Hedges are applied by speakers to make things fuzzier. Being a crucial part of fuzzy language, hedges have attracted attentions by more and more linguistics from different perspectives, including pragmatics, semantics, and discourse analysis and so on. The thesis puts emphasis on studying hedges in human communication from pragmatic perspective. In human communication, sometimes there is no need to give detailed information, or speakers are not sure about the news resource; thereby, using hedges is one of the tactful means to make the communication appropriate and effective. In other words, using hedges to realize their goals by speakers is a tactful method when speakers have troubles in expressing their real feelings towards something. As a tactful means of human communication, hedges can make efforts on ensuring conversation goes on smoothly and hedges take effect in different conversation environments. So it plays an irreplaceable role in daily communication. However, people should make it clear that if hedges are used inadequately, speakers can express wrong messages. So it is important for people to notice that hedges can take effect when they are used appropriately according to communication context. There are various divisions of hedges that are classified by linguistics from different linguistic perspectives. Prince classifies hedges into approximators and shields from pragmatic perspective, which is considered as the most commonly accepted classification. Consequently, this classification is applied by the thesis.As a familiar phenomenon in different languages and cultures, politeness is viewed as a crucial factor of making contribution to successful interpersonal relationship. In daily communication, being polite can help speakers carry on communication smoothly and harmoniously. Since being polite in human communication is very important, linguistic scholars gradually pay attention on politeness that are used in communication. Leech puts forward six maxims of politeness principle, which makes great contribution to politeness study. The thesis illustrates that using hedges to modify expressions can have a better effect on realizing politeness principle. The thesis takes one of the most popular American talk show The Tonight Show as corpus to illustrate how hedges are applied to represent the six maxims of politeness principle to ensure the conversation goes on harmoniously and smoothly.The thesis consists of three parts: introduction, body and conclusion.The first part is the introduction of this thesis. It introduces the study of hedges and the study of politeness principle both at home and abroad. In addition, it also illustrates the significance of the thesis.The second part is the main body of the whole thesis, including three chapters.Chapter One is literature review which concludes three parts. The first part is an overview of the politeness principle proposed by different linguistics and puts emphasis on the six maxims of politeness principle which is proposed by Leech. Section two presents a detailed description about hedges by illustrating some basic concepts of hedges including the concept of hedges defined by different scholars, different classifications of hedges that are made from different linguistic perspectives. Section three presents a brief introduction to The Tonight Show.Chapter Two deals with how to use approximators to represent the six maxims of politeness principle in The Tonight Show. This kind of classification of dividing hedges into approximators and shields is made by Prince from pragmatic perspective. Approximators refer to the words or expressions that change the original meaning of the expressions. Approximators are divided into two categories: adaptors and rounders. Adaptors are those utterances that can show the truth degree of the expression; rounder is the kind of hedges which can make a range of hedges. Examples used in this chapter are various expressions of two sub-categories of approximators: adaptors and rounders in the famous American talk show The Tonight Show. Some examples are used to analyze and show how the six maxims: tact maxim, generosity maxim, approbation maxim, modesty maxim, agreement maxim and sympathy maxim are presented by various approximaotrs expressions respectively. The finding of this chapter is that approximators can be used in different situations to fulfill different maxims of politeness principle.In Chapter Three, the thesis deals with some examples of how to apply the other category of hedges: shields in The Tonight Show to realize Leech’s six maxims of politeness principle. Shields refer to expressions that add some uncertainty into the expression without changing the original meaning. There are also two sub-categories: one is plausibility shield and the other is attribution shield. Plausibility shields refer to words or phases that are used to express the speaker’s uncertainty towards something; attribution shields refer to those expressions that are applied to express the speaker’s uncertainty by quoting others’ thoughts. Various expressions of the two sub-categories of shields: plausibility shields and attribution shields which are used by speakers in The Tonight Show are studied in this chapter. The finding of this chapter is that shields have the same function as the other category of hedges: approximators of representing the six maxims of politeness principle. In addition, according to the speakers’ different aims needed to realize, speakers apply different shields which are appropriate to different contexts to show their politeness. What is more, the same shields expressions that are used in different contexts can represent different maxims of politeness principle.The third part is the conclusion of the thesis. It not only illustrates some major findings of how the two categories of hedges are used to represent the six maxims of politeness principle to fulfill speakers’ different purposes in daily communication, but also puts forward the contribution and shortcomings in the analysis of The Tonight Show. It gives some suggestions for further study with the purpose of analyzing them in a more comprehensive and systematic way. |
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