A Contrastive Analysis Of Hedges Between Chinese And English Company Profiles

Hedges are an important part of fuzzy language and play a significant role in communication,which has attracted the attention of scholars and researchers at home and abroad.In recent years,more and more researchers have been analyzing hedges from the pragmatic level in many fields and they have gained a lot of achievements.However,the study of hedges in some specific genres,such as economy and business is not enough and consensus has not been reached.Hedges frequently used in many genres,without exception,are adopted in the organization of company profiles.This thesis aims to make a contrastive analysis of the usage of hedges between Chinese and English company profiles.To be specific,this thesis focuses on the following three questions:(1)What are the distribution and linguistic realization of hedges in Chinese and English company profiles?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the use of hedges between Chinese and English company profiles?(3)What are the reasons for similarities and differences from the perspective of adaption theory? To answer these questions,two small corpora,which are Chinese Company Profiles Corpus(CCP)and English Company Profiles Corpus(ECP),are founded to analyze and describe the usage of hedges in Chinese and English company profile comprehensively.Each corpus is made up of 30 company profiles,selected from their online official websites.According to Prince et al.'s categorization of hedges,hedges are divided into four types in the two corpora.Firstly,frequency and distribution of hedges and its four subtypes are calculated.Secondly,the linguistic realizations of major hedges in the two corpora are illustrated.Then,similarities and differences and the reasons for similarities and differences under the adaption theory are described.The author carries out a quantitative and qualitative analysis of hedges in company profiles.The major findings according to the data and statistics are:(1)Both Chinese and English company profiles adopt a number of hedges.(2)Four categories of hedges are used in Chinese and English company profiles.(3)Aproximators occur more frequently than shields in Chinese and English company profiles.(4)CCP and ECP show great similarities in linguistic realization.The most frequently used linguistic realization are almost similar in each subcategory of hedges.(5)There exist more hedges in English company profiles than those in Chinese company profiles.(6)There are more attribution shields than plausibility shields in CCP.While,in ECP,plausibility shields are more frequently used than attribution shields.(7)The favored kind of hedges in CCP and ECP are different.Chinese favor adaptors and English rounders.Therefore,from the present study,a conclusion can be drawn that hedges are indispensable in organizing company profiles and there are also some differences in the use of hedges between CCP and ECP.Based on Verschueren(2000),hedging is proved to be a product of the authors' linguistic choices stemming from the dynamic inter-adaption between the linguistic forms and their contextual correlates.Chinese and English company profiles belong to the same genre,and thus their communicative goals are similar which are to introduce the situations of company.Due to that reason,the writers in the two corpora adapt to the features of this genre and adopt a number of hedges especially approximators to achieve communication.In the meantime,the writers employ hedges to show respect and politeness for the readers.Causes for differences are the two worlds from the communicative context,which constrains the writers' choice-making of hedging,namely,the social world and mental world of the writers.Specifically,they have different environments,values,interpersonal relationships and motivations.The contrastive analysis of hedges in company profiles could enrich the present studies of hedges and facilitate the understanding of company profiles.Besides,the awareness of hedges contributes to the writing of company profiles in the two languages and promotes the cross-cultural communication because of the analysis of different cultures.