| First proposed by the American linguist George Lakoff in 1972, the notion of"hedges"and/or"hedging"has gradually become firmly established in linguistic studies and is believed to have the potential for serving as a periscope to language. Linguists have studied this universal phenomenon from various perspectives ever since, ranging from pure semantic analysis to functional and pragmatic analysis either within a certain text type or beyond. Since the 1980s, the focus of hedging research has shifted to genre-based contextual framework, with hedges in LSP (Language for Specific Purposes) texts (such as academic and scientific writings) being studied in an extensive, multi-dimensional way.Based on the previous studies, the present study intends to explore hedging phenomenon in English popular scientific discourse, an area which has received little attention. With carefully selected corpus, the author starts out with a quantitative analysis of the surface features of hedging in English popular scientific discourse. Then the author tries to analyze the semantic and pragmatic functions of hedging in popular scientific texts, pointing out that semantically speaking, hedging serves to increase the fuzziness of the propositional contents whereas pragmatically, it is featured by its distinct function of increasing the degree of precision of the given information. On the basis of this, the author arrives at the conclusion that as a component of vague language, hedging is a metalinguistic mechanism that enables people to describe the world as properly as possible. Furthermore, in light of the fact that hedging in Chinese remains a rarely explored area up till now, the study also ventures to discuss the similarities and differences of hedging between Chinese and English via a translational point of view, and the result of the analysis, as it turns out, may provide further insights into the two languages in question and shed light on areas like translation, second language teaching and learning. |
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