A Comparative Study Of Hedges In English And Chinese Public Interest Advertisements From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Hedges as one of the properties of language were first put forward by George Lakoff in 1972. Since then, Brown & Levinson, Leech and some other linguists began to get involved in this field. Most of the studies are conducted from various angles. At the very beginning, researches on hedges only focus on semantics and syntax, then with the appearance and development of pragmatics, much attentions have been drawn towards the study of hedges on the level of pragmatics. And indeed the results are rich and fruitful.Public interest advertisements, a special type of advertisements, can commonly be seen in daily life. In order to build up an acceptable relationship between readers and advertisers, hedges are widely applied in this specific genre. Hence, it is necessary to carry out a study on hedges in public interest advertisements. Although in recent years, there are some researches on hedges in advertisements, studies about hedges in public interest advertisements are few, let alone the comparative analysis between hedges in English and Chinese public interest advertisements.Therefore, based on the self-made corpora, this study attempts to conduct a quantitative and qualitative study on hedges in English and Chinese public interest advertisements from the perspective of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, aiming to find out the similarities and differences of hedges used in public interest advertisements. Each corpus consists of 60 pieces of advertisements and all of them are selected at random for the sake of objectivity and validity. According to Hyland’s hedges model, with the help of search function of world file and hand scanning, the number and frequency of all types of hedges have been identified and calculated. After the comparative analysis, some results have been found out.The statistics indicate that there are various kinds of hedges in English and Chinese public interest advertisements. In terms of the overall distribution and frequency, English public interest advertisements adopt more hedges than Chinese ones. The preference of types of hedges in English and Chinese public interest advertisements is different. On the basis of Adaptation Theory, hedges usually act as ways to make continuous language choices in order to adapt to certain contexts and conduct a successful communication as a result. Hence, according to this theory, the writer conducts a pragmatic analysis of hedges in English and Chinese public interest advertisements, and then explores the essential pragmatic functions of hedges in public interest advertisements, namely, to increase accuracy, to achieve politeness, to avoid absoluteness and to strengthen persuasion. Hopefully, not only can this study benefit advertisers to use hedges properly but readers to understand public interest advertisements better and do good to the society.