A Contrastive Study Of Hedges In English And Chinese Political News Reports

In our daily life,news reports are playing a more and more significant role.We can get ourselves informed of important events and hot issues both at home and abroad from news reports.News can be classified into different kinds including political news,economic news,culture news,sports news and social news,etc.Due to the requirements of the news reports,the accuracy is one of the necessary characteristics.However,it does not mean that accuracy and vagueness are incompatible.In fact,there are plenty of hedges in news reports.And many linguists have paid more attention to the study of hedges in news reports.In 1965,the famous American scholar Zadeh introduced the theory of fuzzy-set,based on which several foreign and domestic scholars began to investigate fuzzy phenomenon.Since the distinguished American linguist George Lakoff(1972)introduced the definition of hedges into the field of linguistic,some other domestic and foreign linguists have proposed the classification of hedges from different perspectives.The present study applied the classifications of Prince et al.(1982).He classified hedges into two classifications: shields and approximators.Shields can also be divided into two subtypes: attribution shields and plausibility shields.Approximators are further divided into two subtypes: adaptors and rounders.Based on the literature review,most of previous studies on hedges merely pay attention to the use of hedges between two corpora comparison and hardly compare the using of hedges among three corpora.This paper illustrated the using of hedges in English-medium political news,Chinese-authored English political news and Chinese political news.The present study analyzed political news on President Xi's overseas visit from April to December in 2015.In this study,150 political news reports are selected as analytical corpora from some domestic and foreign newspapers,and each corpus consists of fifty political news reports respectively.With the help of Chi-square analysis,both qualitative and quantitative approaches are involved in this study.In the three political news corpora,the frequency and distribution of hedges have been investigated,and some similarities and differences on the use of hedges have been analyzed.Through analysis,the major findings are as follows: firstly,according to the analyzed data,there are 578 hedges in the English-medium political news corpus.In the Chinese-authored English political news and Chinese political news corpora,there are 448 and 767 hedges respectively.Based on the investigation of the three political news corpora,the frequency count of the hedges in the three corpora reveals 20.5‰,17.4‰ and 11.4‰respectively.Secondly,the distribution patterns of types of hedges show that in the corpus of English-medium political news,attribution shields account for 51.38% of all hedges followed by rounders 23.88%,adaptors 17.47% and plausibility shields 7.28%.In the corpus of Chinese-authored English political news,attribution shields account for 59.82% of all hedgesfollowed by rounders 24.78%,adaptors 8.93% and plausibility shields 6.47%.In the Chinese political news corpus,rounders account for 36.90% of all hedges followed by attribution shields 28.30%,adaptors 27.64% and plausibility shields 7.30%.The analytical results suggest that in both English-medium political news and Chinese-authored English political news,the frequency of attribution shields is the highest among the four hedges.The rounders are more favored than adaptors.The plausibility shields is the least favored hedges.In the Chinese political news corpus,the frequency of rounders is the highest among the four hedges.The attribution shields are more favored than the adaptors.The plausibility shields is the least used one.Finally,by performing Chi-square analysis,there are significant differences regarding the use of hedges in the three political news corpora.The present study has some practical significance for the comparative study of English-medium political news,Chinese-authored English political news and Chinese political news corpora.Not only can it promote the study of fuzzy linguistics,but also can have some implications on the study of political news.The results of this study can help journalists and readers to use and understand the vagueness of political news more appropriately,making the expression of English learners more reasonable and improving the intercultural communicative competence.This thesis falls into five chapters.The first chapter introduces a brief introduction of the thesis,including the research background,purpose,significance and layout.Chapter two is literature review.The author distinguishes the related terms and reviews hedges and news both at home and abroad.In Chapter Three,the research methodology is introduced including research questions,research instrument,data collection and analytical procedure.Chapter four presents the results and discussions.Chapter five is the conclusion,including major findings,practical implications,limitations and some suggestions for future study.