On Applications Of Hedges In Communication

Since the Fuzzy Set was proposed by L. A. Zadeh, an American expert on the controlling system, fuzziness has already attracted a great many people's wide attention in almost every field related to not only linguistics but mathematics, philosophy, and so on as well. As a great amount of research on fuzziness has been carried out, people have been gradually becoming aware of its importance and application in our daily communication. As is known to us all traditionally, language we use to express ourselves is required to be as precise as possible. It seems to the speaker that preciseness is the best choice when we talk to others. However, language obeys the same rule as everything else existing in the world because a coin has two sides. The other side of preciseness in a language (vagueness) is also of great importance. Both foreigners and Chinese scholars have conducted some researches on vague language from the angles of philosophy, psychology, psychology cognitive, semantics, pragmatics, syntax, lexicology, etc. and have brought about vagueness and its component element-hedges to a newer stage. Vagueness is not judged by the simple standard"good"or"bad."What really matters is how vague is properly used to achieve what we want to convey in our daily communication (Daily communication means both everyday dialogues and written literature in certain spheres in a broad sense to the introduction of vagueness efficiently at the author's convenience. And only written articles are to help exchange ideas between the speaker and the hearer in a special way.) This dissertation aims mainly at usages of several types of hedges in communicating and focuses on the employment of various hedges from the angles of pragmatics based on the previous studies and the two pragmatic principles (CP and PP) in certain fields.After a brief introduction to the research done on vagueness, Chapter One begins with what vague language is, followed by its causation and finally arrives at a distinction between vague language and language vague and works out a working definition for hedges-the focal point in vague language usages. Chapter Two is first devoted to the definitions given by different linguists and then comes to the increasing scope of hedges from various aspects, several other points related to hedges and their main types. Due to its indeterminacy, vague language is supposed to produce special effects. On the basis of the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle, Chapter Three analyses the adoption of hedges to realize different pragmatic functions...