A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In English Political News From The Perspective Of Linguistic Adaptation Theory

Fuzziness is one of the inherent features of all natural languages and plays a significant role in human communication.As the typical representative of fuzzy language,hedge is a ubiquitous linguistic phenomenon.Since the American linguist George Lakoff first put forward the notion of “hedge” in 1972,a great number of scholars have conducted researches on hedges from diverse perspectives.In regard to the studies from pragmatic perspective,many are based on Grice's Cooperative Principle and Leech's Politeness Principle,while a few are conducted under the framework of Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory.News,being the reports about current events,exerts great influence on people's daily life and has attracted numerous scholars to make relevant studies,including the pragmatic analysis of hedges utilized in this specific genre.Nevertheless,researches on hedges in political news are fairly rare.Therefore,in the light of Lakoff's definition and Prince et al.'s classification of hedges,this thesis attempts to explore the generative mechanism of hedges employed in English political news with Verschueren's Linguistic Adaptation Theory and to summarize the main pragmatic functions hedges perform in English political news.In the present study,the author established a mini-corpus,which is composed of 30 pieces of English political news collected from an authoritative mass medium in the world,namely,the Washington Post(https://www.washingtonpost.com).According to the classification of Prince et al.,the four subcategories of hedges appearing in the self-built corpus are identified respectively by taking into account specific context.Then through quantitative analysis,it can be revealed that all the sub-types of hedges,including adaptors,rounders,plausibility shields and attribution shields,abound in English political news and attribution shields are the most favored among the four kinds of hedges.After qualitative analysis,this thesis shows that Linguistic Adaptation Theory can adequately account for the existence of hedges in English political news from the pragmatic perspective.To be specific,the employment of hedges is not only the result of making linguistic choices but also the adaptation to various contextual correlates,which consist of the physical world,the social world and the mental world.Moreover,hedges perform specific pragmatic functions in English political news reports,mainly involving increasing credibility,raising efficiency,enhancing flexibility and avoiding sensitive topics.This thesis is conducive to enriching the pragmatic researches on hedges in English political news.Besides,it can help journalists adopt hedges more appropriately in political news reporting and facilitate readers' comprehension of hedges as well as the information conveyed in English political news.