A Study Of Hedges In English Broadcasting News Texts From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Fuzziness,similar to accuracy,is an intrinsic property of human language.Fuzzy language exists widely in our daily communication.Since fuzziness received attention in linguistic field,numerous scholars both at home and abroad have studied and probed it from various perspectives.Hedges,as the important component of fuzzy language,are not only a kind of linguistic choice,but also a kind of communicative strategy.The concept of hedges was firstly put forward by the American linguist Lakoff in 1970 s.Whereafter,Ellen F.Prince,Joel Frader and Charles Bosk made an explanation and classification of hedges from the view of pragmatics.With the increasing attention to hedges,the study of hedges has gradually expanded to more domains.In the late 1980 s to the early 1990 s,Chinese scholars began studying hedges,and Wu Tieping was the first one to introduce hedges at home.Most of the previous studies concentrate on the classification,identification and application of hedges in some certain styles,such as business discourses,academic discourses and literary discourses.However,studies of hedges in news texts,especially in English broadcasting news texts by the way of self-built corpora are far from enough.This thesis,taking hedges in BBC(British Broadcasting Corporation)and CRI(China Radio International)English broadcasting news texts as the main study object,based on Lakoff's definition of hedges and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges,under the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory,adopts both qualitative and quantitative analyses to make a study of hedges in English broadcasting news texts.Quantitative analysis is applied to find out characteristics of the frequency and distribution of hedges in BBC and CRI English broadcasting news texts with the help of corpus analysis software,Ant Conc 3.4.3w.Qualitative analysis is used to define and classify hedges,analyze potential reasons for the existence of hedges in English broadcasting news texts from the perspective of Adaptation Theory,and summarize pragmatic functions of hedges in English broadcasting news texts with examples.Two corpora built in the study,BBC Corpus and CRI Corpus,are composed of 47959 words,including 100 BBC news texts and 100 CRI news texts from January 2011 toDecember 2015,which are all selected randomly from BBC and CRI official websites.This thesis mainly explores three research questions: 1)What are characteristics of the frequency and distribution of hedges in English broadcasting news texts? 2)How does Adaptation Theory account for the existence of hedges in English broadcasting news texts? 3)What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in English broadcasting news texts?After data processing and analysis,the major findings are as follows:Firstly,the study shows that hedges do exist in English broadcasting news texts,and each subcategory of hedges can be found in them.In BBC corpus and CRI corpus,the proportion of approximators is much higher than that of shields.As for the four subclasses of hedges,rounders take up the largest proportion in two corpora.Contrastively,plausibility shields are the least.Secondly,Adaptation Theory is adopted to explore the potential reasons for the existence of hedges in English broadcasting news texts.It is found that hedges are adopted in English broadcasting news texts to adapt to the mental world,the social world and the physical world.Thirdly,hedges in English broadcasting news texts have significant functions.The proper exploration of hedges in English broadcasting news texts can not only improve the precision and the persuasion of news reports,but also keep the expressions polite and protect the reporters and the information reporters.Besides,for the high playback speed of English broadcasting news,the use of hedges can highlight the key points so that the audience can get the main idea of news reports more easily.