Pragmatic Studies Of The Interpersonal Functions Of Hedges In Communication

Since the Fuzzy Set was proposed by L.A. Zadeh, an American expert on the controlling system, fuzziness has already drawn a great many linguistic scholars'attention. As a great number of researches on fuzziness have been carried out, there has been gradually more awareness of its importance and application in our daily communication. Traditionally, it seems that precision is the symbol of good language. However, due to the great efforts made by the linguistic scholars both at home and abroad, we can come to the following conclusion that language, just like everything else in the universe, has two sides, which means it can not be judged by two-valued theory---good or bad. Of the greatest importance is how hedges are properly used to achieve what we want to convey in our daily communication. However, up till now, fewer systematic researches on hedges have been made in terms of interpersonal functions. It is a promising attempt to probe the hedges and the three interpersonal functions based on the FAT Theory, the Cooperative Principle and the Politeness Principle respectively. This thesis, therefore, on the basis of the previous researches and the above pragmatic theories, has put its emphasis on the three interpersonal functions brought up by hedges from the angle of pragmatics.After a brief introduction to hedges, Chapter One gives a brief introduction to the vague language and hedges. Chapter Two is the literature review part, which lists the origin and achievements of hedges to lead to the working definition and taxonomy of hedges. Chapter Three continues with the theoretical framework on which this thesis will be built. Chapter Four is the most important part in which a detailed analysis of the three interpersonal functions is made on the basis of the pragmatic theories. Chapter Five concludes the whole thesis together with its major findings and suggestions for further studies in this field, i.e., last but not least, the author sums up the main points that the study tries to achieve in this thesis and points out some issues the paper does not discuss fully, which are worth studying in the future.