| This paper mainly studies the functions of English hedges in verbal communication from the perspective of pragmatics. Hedges are important parts of fuzzy language. They are common phenomena and play a vital role in verbal communication. Lakeoff originated hedges after the American professor L. Zadeh put forward the famous fuzzy theory. In this paper, the author further explores the connotation, classification and present development of hedges based on the relative domestic and abroad studies.First of all, the author collects 24 examples from English newspapers and magazines as materials and makes a general pragmatic analysis on hedges in verbal communication with the help of some pragmatic theories, such as cooperative principle, politeness principle and conversational implicature, thus get the general functions of hedges. Then the author makes a specific analysis on functions of hedges in two different contexts. The quantity and distribution of hedges in two self-compiled corpora, news corpus and business negotiation corpus, are calculated. In this part, the author also analyses different functions of hedges in each corpus and the reasons why there are differences between the two corpora. Through the analysis we can find 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 of communication. Besides, hedges still have something to do with some social factors. E.g. sex, social position, profession and so on.Last but not least this paper points out that the analysis on functions of hedges in verbal communication is of great practical and guiding significance to foreign language teaching. Proper application of hedges can not only greatly improve teaching standard but also strengthen students' pragmatic competence in communication. |
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