A Comparative Study Of Hedges In Chinese And American Press Conferences From Pragmatic Perspective

The present thesis is a corpus-based contrastive analysis of hedges in Chinese and American press conferences.This research is conducted on the basis of two self-constructed corpora.The objective of the research is to find out the similarities and differences between the using of hedges in American and Chinese press conferences and illustrate the hedging phenomenon in Press conference reports by Face Theory and Politeness principles.The thesis carries out quantitative and qualitative studies based on two self-constructed corpora in which the hedges are respectively employed in press conferences by the official website of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of PRC(the People's Republic of China)and the official website of the USA(United States of America)White House.There are three research questions listed as follows:(1).The frequency and distribution of the hedges in the Chinese and American spokespersons;(2).The similarities and differences between Chinese and American spokespersons in using hedges;(3).The pragmatic functions of Chinese and American hedges.After the quantitative and qualitative analysis,it can be found that the existence of hedges in two corpora is pervasive.After the calculations combined with various methods during the process of sorting out data,three main findings have been made:Firstly,hedges are popular in the American and Chinese press conferences.Hedges account for 4.7% in Chinese and 6.1% in American respectively.It can be concluded that American spokesman are more likely to use hedges than Chinese spokesman;Secondly,four sub-type of hedges,namely adaptors,rounders,plausibility shields and attribution shields are all applied in the two corpora.The percentages of the four sub-types of hedges indicate that American spokesman are more likely to use adaptors and plausibility shields,while Chinese spokesman are more likely to use rounders and attribution shields;Thirdly,the reason for the different uses of hedges in Chinese and American press conferences mainly rely on their different pragmatic functions.The US spokesperson uses the hedges to fill in the information gap and maintain negative face.The Chinese spokesperson tend to use the hedges to display objectivity and increasing the credibility.Apart from the direct research results,this thesis also sheds some light on related studies.Students should raise their awareness in comprehending and employing hedgesin press conferences.