A Study On Hedges In Diplomatic Discourse From The Perspective Of Metapragmatics

Hedges,as important language strategies,are widely used in language.Diplomatic discourse is the carrier of the state position and diplomatic strategy.The American spokesperson often uses hedges so as to make diplomatic discourse become more precise and polite.Hedges,as indicators of metapragmatic awareness,reflect the language user’s metapragmatic awareness in the process of language selection.Therefore,it is significant to study hedges in diplomatic discourse from the perspective of metapragmatics.This research studies the use of hedges in diplomatic discourse from the perspective of metapragmatics.This thesis tries to answer the following three questions.1.What are the types and frequency of hedges in diplomatic discourse?2.In what ways do hedges reflect metapragmatic awareness in diplomatic discourse?3.What are the functions of hedges in negotiating meaning in diplomatic discourse from the perspective of metapragmatics?In order to answer these three research questions,the study selects 35 American press conferences from the US State Department website in 2018.Quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis methods are adopted in this study.For the former,the author annotates and counts hedges with BFSU Qualitative Coder according to Varttala’s classification of hedges.For the latter,ways of hedges reflecting metapragmatic awareness and functions of hedges from the perspective of metapragmatics are analyzed.The major findings are as follows.Firstly,five types of hedges are used in diplomatic discourse.The frequency of hedges in diplomatic discourse from high to low is full verbs,modal auxiliaries,adverbs,nouns and adjectives.Secondly,hedges reflect metapragmatic awareness in different ways.Hedges are used to reflect metacognitive awareness by presenting expected information,introducing new information and indicating old information,to reflect metarepresentational awareness by showing attitudes and intentions and to reflect metacommunicative awareness by achieving politeness and saving face.In addition,tentative cognition verbs and modal auxiliaries are used frequently to reflect these three forms of metapragmatic awareness.Lastly,functions of hedges in negotiating meaning from the perspective of metapragmatics are discussed,which include harmonious relationship maintaining function,discourse organization function,identity building function and evaluation function.This thesis discusses hedges from the perspective of metapragmatics,which is conducive to having a better understanding of hedges in diplomatic discourse and expands the research scope of hedges to some extent.