A Contrastive Study Of Hedges In English And Chinese Drinking Advertisements Based On Adaptation Theory

Hedge, one of the most important components in fuzzy linguistics, is chiefly studied from the perspectives of semantics and logic, after being officially proposed by Lakoff in 1972. After 1980 s, with the gradual maturity of pragmatics, more and more scholars began to conduct a research on hedges in practical discourses, advertising language included, within the guidance of Adaptation Theory, Relevance Theory, Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle. With the rapid development of economy and globalization, advertising becomes increasingly crucial in human daily life. However, there are few researchers having probed into the usage of hedges in English and Chinese advertisements. Therefore this thesis tries to make a comparative analysis of English and Chinese drinking advertisements, guided by Adaptation Theory, aiming to draw the scholars’ attention in this field and propel the application and development of hedges in English and Chinese advertisements.Adaptation Theory, put forward by Belgian scholar Verschueren, is regarded as one of the most influential and strongest explanatory theories in pragmatics. The core of this theory is that language use is a process of continuous choice-making and dynamic adaptation-making. The creation of advertisements is also a dynamic procedure, during which the advertisers continually make dynamic adaptations to contextual correlates and structural objects with the ultimate aim to attract the audiences’ attention and elicit them to take action. This thesis, under the guidance of this theory, explores whether there are similarities and differences in the employment of hedges in English and Chinese drinking advertisements and the intrinsic adaptative factors, allowing for similarities and differences, through both quantitative and qualitative analyses of 130 English and 130 Chinese advertisement samples, which are randomly collected from websites, newspapers and also posters.After a detailed analysis of data collection, it is found that there are hedges between these two corpora and both similarities and differences in the application of hedges are also found out. The main similarities lie in that both corpora prefer to adopt approximators rather than shields, to be specific, they favor more adaptors than the long attribution shields; moreover, both of them have similar usage in the rounders and attribution shields. The differences are that Chinese copywriters adopted much fewer hedges in their slogans, compared with that their native English peers did in English advertisements; besides there are more times of appearance of all the four subtypes of hedges in English corpus than Chinese one and there is significant difference in the use of adaptors and plausibility shields in both corpora. According to Adaptation Theory, the employment of hedges in English and Chinese drinking advertisements is chiefly by reason of adaptation to consumers’ mental world of pursuing safety and being loved and conceptual fuzziness and advertisers’ psychology of desire to maintain good relationship with customers, objective rule of advertising’ simplicity and the specific communicative style of advertisement. However, different culture, language structure and degree of metapragmatic awareness will definitely have an impact on the preference to hedges of copywriters.This thesis can not only enrich the present study of hedges but also help consumers further understand the linguistic strategy used by advertisers to some degree so as to avoid being trapped for customers. Meanwhile it has directive significance for the writing of advertisements, especially the transnational creation of advertisements.