A Study On Pragmatic Functions Of Hedges In Defendants' Court Arguments

As an important member of fuzzy linguistics,hedges can change the degree of ambiguity of the modifier,making meaning expression more ambiguous or more accurate,or express the speaker's attitudes or opinions,making tone expression politer and more euphemistic.The data of this thesis are derived from twenty court cases from Chinese Court Net,including seven civil cases,eight criminal cases and five administrative cases.This thesis takes Prince and He Ziran's classifications of hedges as the basic framework and adopts both quantitative and qualitative methods.Moreover,this study mainly probes into the classifications,features and pragmatic functions of hedges in defendants' court arguments.The results of statisstical analysis indicate that there are mainly approximators and shields in defendants' court arguments.Between them,approximators account for 55.7%,while the percentage for shields is only 44.3%.The features of hedges used by defendants are accuracy and decency in meaning expression,and euphemism and relaxation in tone expression,which makes hedges in defendants' court arguments have its own special pragmatic functions.Therefore,in court debates,the defendants tend to choose hedges as their main language strategy to achieve their purposes of persuasion.The study shows that there are two pragmatic functions of hedges in defendants' court arguments: self-protective function and polite function.The self-protective function is achieved from the following three ways.Firstly,hedges can help to reduce the ambiguity,offer premises and deny the speaker's implication from degree,making discourse meaning more accurate and inclined to the facts,thus achieving their purposes of persuasion better.Secondly,hedges can help to use approximate numbers,restrict the topics and blur the precise words from scope,making discourse meaning more appropriate,thus avoiding bearing legal liability because of absolute words.Thirdly,hedges can also help to emphasize or summarize the action's frequency from time so that the discourse meaning becomes more authentic and credible,so as to deliver information thatis good for himself.The polite function is mainly achieved from two ways.One is to convey defendants' opinions directly and euphemistically by using the subjective expressions with first-person,modal verbs and conditional sentences.The other is to express defendants' attitudes indirectly by stating objective facts,quoting relevant legal documents and using indirect refusing words.Both of them can reduce tough tone and make the tone more euphemistic and relaxing,showing politeness to judges,so as to make it easier for judges to accept their opinions.This study expands the scope of the research on hedges,which has some theoretical values and practical significance.However,the samples analyzed and the breadth and depth of this study are not enough.The thesis hopes to inspire other researchers to do further researches on court arguments and promote the study of it.