Research On Communicative Contextual Adaptability Of The Hedges In Silk

Hedges are widely studied by scholars at home and abroad.In the pragmatic study of hedges,scholars mainly focus on it in written language,but few on it in spoken dialogue.Based on Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory,the author takes the communicative contextual adaptation as the theoretical framework,and chooses a British drama Silk about lawyers’ life as research text.Then,the author collects and counts the number of four kinds of hedges with the help of AntConc and calculates the distribution and frequency of them in the conversations of the characters in Silk,and analyzes how the hedges show the adaptation in communicative context.It is found that people in the drama are inclined to choose a few more hedges in daily communication than the communication in courtroom,but both of them make use of shields more than approximators.Besides,plausibility shields are employed more frequently in daily communication than in trail argument.On the contrary,attribution shields are used more in trial argument than in daily communication.The author of this study finds that the choice of hedges in the conversations in Silk is a process of dynamic adaptation to mental world,social world and physical world of communicators in communicative context.In mental world,the choice of hedges mainly adapts to two factors,motivation and emotion,so as to provide the right amount of information,make the utterance appropriate,improve the interpersonal relationship,and make the utterance cohesive,and it can also strengthen or alleviate the speaker’s emotion.In social world,the choice of hedges adapts to two factors,power relationship and obligation to make the utterance polite and euphemistic.In physical world,the choice of hedges mainly adapts to spatial factors.Compared with daily conversation,the communicators in courtroom tend to choose more attribution shields to get rid of their responsibilities.This study holds that in order to achieve communicative purpose,the employment of hedges in spoken language of communicators is not only the result of language choice,but also the process of adaptation to communicative context.