A Study Of Hedges And Their Pragmatic Functions In Chinese And English Editorial Discourses -Adaptation Theory Approach

Vagueness is a basic and natural property of language, the application of hedges is an important manifestation of the ambiguity of the language. Hedges, one of the most significant members of vagueness family, were first proposed by American well-known linguist Lakoff. It was defined as the words "make things fuzzier or less fuzzy". In the early 1980s, Professor Wu Tieping published a series of papers of fuzzy language in China, arousing many Chinese scholars' interest. He mentioned that hedges not only can make language fuzzy, but also make language accurate. His researches attract many scholars' interest in hedges. Editorial, one of the news commentaries, presents comments on important issues with accurate language. In reality, hedges largely exist in editorials. However, till September 2015, only four researches on hedges in editorial discourses are only searched in CNKI, among these four researches, the study of hedges both in Chinese and English editorials was not found. Thus the study of hedges and their pragmatic functions in Chinese and English editorials will be meaningful.This study established two parallel corpora, a Chinese corpus and an English corpus, based on the classification of hedges proposed by Prince et al, the use of hedges in Chinese and English editorials were discussed. Under the framework of Adaptation Theory proposed by Jef Vershueren, the pragmatic functions of hedges in Chinese and English editorials were explored. Chinese corpus contains 20 editorials from People's Daily and 20 editorials from Global Times which selected from March 2015 to December 2015. English corpus contains 20 editorials from New York Times and 20 editorials from The Washington Post during the same period. This study summarized the hedges and calculate the frequency of hedges in two corpora, the data analysis found that hedges are more frequently used in English editorials, which due to the cultural differences between western countries and China as well as the preference of language expression. Besides, this study focused on the pragmatic functions of hedges in Chinese and English editorials under the framework of Adaptation theory. And this study analyzed following 8 pragmatic function of hedges adopted in Chinese and English editorials:1. Enhancing the objectivity and reliability; 2. Avoiding the responsibility; 3. Improving the information precision 4. Expressing accuracy; 5. Narrow the distance between editorialists and readers; 6. Enhancing persuasion and 7. Reflecting culture; 8. Bing timely.The study of hedges in Chinese and English editorials will play a positive role to help readers more accurate and profound understanding the point of view of hedges. And it can also enrich the study of hedges in different discourses which has theoretical significance. However, due to the limitation of the research time, the analysis is still inadequate. The future studies can focus on a comparative study of hedges between news report and editorials which will help readers have a deeper understanding of hedging strategies in news style discourses.