Functional Analysis Of Hedges In English Academic Book Reviews

Being clear and precise is an ideal state pursued by language users. Actually, in our daily life, whether in oral or written language, we use vagueness frequently. So vagueness is one of the features of natural language.Since Professor L.A.Zadeh in the United States put forward the vagueness theory in 1965, a series of new subjects such as fuzzy psychology, fuzzy mathematics, fuzzy logic, fuzzy linguistics came into bloom in the world. As a member of the family of vague language, hedge was introduced and analyzed first by G. Lakoff in 1972. Fraser, Brown & Levinson, Hübler, Rosch, etc. analyzed hedge from different aspects. Scholars in China like Wu Tieping and He Ziran also did some researches on some functions of hedge since 1980s. It is very significant to study hedges because of its rich semantic features and special pragmatic functions. To study hedges is useful not only to theoretical study of vagueness but also to human's communicative activitiesAt present, most scholars begin to study hedges in scientific articles, English news, English advertisement etc. But the research of hedges in academic book reviews is relatively little. English academic book reviews have been a par of the academic landscape for almost 2000 years and evolved as a modern genre in the middle seventeenth century. As a sub-genre of academic discourse, it has received less attention and seems to have largely escaped from linguistic scrutiny due to its unremarkable character as reference for a long time. It is necessary to make a study of it.Based on the combination of Politeness Principle and Face-threatening Act theory and Halliday's Functional Grammar, using English academic book reviews as the materials, this thesis analyzed and induced the realization, distribution and functions of hedges in this special genre. It may provides assistance for the dialogue between Pragmatics and Functional Grammar, promote them to learn and complement each other. According to the result of data analysis it was found that different sections of book reviews have different distribution of hedges. The section of conclusion has the highest frequency of hedges about 5.6%, followed by body and introduction, about 3.7% and 3.1% respectively. It was also found that in English academic book reviews, hedges have and fulfill multi-functions interpersonally. Hedges can mitigate the confrontation between the reviewer and the author. They can also make the criticisms appear to be milder and more indirect. Meanwhile, it fulfills the textual functions of signaling text organization. It also gives us the enjoyment of beauty.