The Study Of Communicative Functions Of Hedges From The Perspective Of Pragmatics

After Zadeh puts forward the fuzzy theory, Lakoff is the first person who coins the word"hedge"and provides related theory. Hedges are important elements of fuzzy language and are universal, which plays a vital role in verbal communication. This paper mainly studies the functions of hedges in communication from the perspective of pragmatics. The author, based on the related study both home and abroad, explores the definition, classification and present research situation.First of all, the author makes a general analysis of hedges, and then illustrates the general functions of hedges by using the pragmatic principles such as cooperative principle, politeness principle, face threatening acts and conversational implicature. Then the author makes a specific analysis of functions of hedges in two different contexts-news and business negotiation and the quantity and distribution in two corpora are calculated; Meanwhile, the author also analyses the different functions of hedges in each corpus and the reasons why they are different between the two corpora. Through the analysis it can be found that the functions of hedges have some differences in different contexts. This indicates that hedges have close connection with the context in which they occur. Proper application of hedges in a certain context will help people communicate with each other smoothly and successfully thus achieves their goal during communication.Finally, this paper points out that the analysis of functions of hedges in verbal communication is greatly practical and significant in foreign language teaching. Proper application of hedges can not only greatly improve teaching standard but also strengthen students'pragmatic competence in communication.