Hedges In Chinese Esl Learners’ Argumentative Essays

As a universal phenomenon in human language, hedges or hedging is the interest of many scholars. The notion of hedges was first put forward by Lakoff in 1972, and the study of hedges has started from semantics to pragmatics, sociolinguistics, etc. Hedges have abundant semantic and pragmatic functions, and the proper use of them is regarded as one of the symbols of success in English writing.In order to have a sound understanding of Chinese English majors‘ behavior of using hedges in their argumentative essays, this paper adopts the contrastive interlanguage approach. A part of texts are chosen from WECCL(Written English Corpus of Chinese College Learners) and LOCNESS(Louvain Corpus of Native English Essays) in order to compile learners‘ corpus and native speakers‘ corpus. Ant Conc 3.2 is used to retrieve frequencies from corpora and SPSS is used for data analyses.The major findings of the present study are as follows:1) Chinese ESL learners use more hedges with limited types compared with native speakers. Chinese learners heavily depend on a narrower range of hedging devices in their essays, for example epistemic verbs. 2) In general, there are significant differences in the whole picture of hedging use between Chinese ESL learners and American and British college students. Except for epistemic modal auxiliaries, Chinese learners differ significantly from native speakers in the use of other four grammatical categories of hedges, namely full verbs, epistemic adjectives, epistemic adverbs, epistemic nouns. 3) There are many reasons which can lead to the non-native features in the use of hedges in Chinese ESL learners‘ argumentative essays, such as the culture differences between Chinese and English, first language transfer, the neglect of pragmatic function of hedges in second language teaching, and insufficient language input. According to those findings, this paper put forward some pedagogical implications.