| Most concepts in the real world are vague—some are slightly, some aremarkedly. Vagueness is the essential feature of human mind, which suggeststhe reasoning process of human mind is filled with fuzzy truth, fuzzyconnectives, and fuzzy reasoning rules. Fuzzy linguistics explores the vaguephenomena in all fields of the study. While hedges are an interesting andmeaningful aspect in this kind of study. Journalistic English is a special formof language and has unique features at various language levels. The use ofhedges in journalistic English reflects the accuracy of news reports and hasparticular contextual functions in the light of pragmatic theories.This dissertation is composed of six parts. Chapter One introduces thesituation of the hedges study and significance of the present research. ChapterTwo reviews the studies of fuzzy linguistics and hedges, and distinguishes therelated terms in this dissertation, such as hedges and hedging, hedges,vagueness and fuzziness. Chapter Three examines the features of journalisticEnglish mainly from two aspects: lexical features and syntactical features, italso gives a brief account of functions of hedges in English news reports.Chapter Four is the design and method of present research including theresources of the mini corpus used in this research. Chapter Five is the body ofthis dissertation. It analyzes the hedges in journalistic English from twoaspects: lexical hedges and non-lexical hedges and ends with the examinationsof the frequency of hedges in different news reports. The theoretical analysis isconducted in this part in the light of Cooperative Principle, PolitenessPrinciple, Speech Act Theory. Then the author proposes another analysis... |
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