A Critical Analysis Of English Hedging And Its Communicative Functions

As a part of fuzzy language, hedges are common and play an important role in spoken or written communications. They dramatically benefit linguistic expressiveness and increase communicative effects. Their proper use can make linguistic expressions more mild, polite, flexible and effective and improve the interpersonal relationship between discourse participants, thus helping achieve the purpose of communication.The concepts of hedge and hedging have been in the linguistic literature since the term hedge was introduced by Lakoff (1972) to describe "words whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy". In English, there are various kinds of words and sentence patterns which can function as hedges. Because they have plentiful semantic features and pragmatic functions, there is no substitute for them. Hedging is one part of epistemic modality. With regard to its pragmatic functions, it indicates the speaker or writer's lack of an explicit and complete commitment to the truth value of a proposition, as well as the speaker or writer's unwillingness to make the commitment.For a long time, the study of hedging can only be found on the levels of semantics and syntax. But this is just one side of the same coin. In order to improve the language proficiency, a pragmatic analysis from the perspective of language use and interpretation is an important and necessary process for the research of hedging. The concepts of hedge and hedging have been developed from logic and semantics to discourse analysis and pragmatics since the 1980s. Based on the relevant research, this paper further explores the semantic features, linguistic realizations and classifications of hedging. Then this paper analyzes the use of hedging devices in detail through communicative principles: Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle and FTA theory and examines the epistemic reasons for the use of hedges and their pragmatic values and interpersonal functions in communication. At last, the author sums up the main points that the study tries to achieve in this paper and points out some issues thepaper does not discuss fully, but they are worth studying in the future. The issues include: hedging research from the perspectives of interlanguage and foreign language teaching; the contrastive analysis of hedging devices in different fields and genres; hedging research from the hearer's or the reader's point of view.