A Study Of Interpersonal Meaning Of Hedges In English Academic Discourses

Since the concept of hedges was brought forth by Lackoff in 1972, linguists have made fruitful achievements in researches on hedges from perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, discourses and specific texts. All the researches indicate that hedges provide a brand-new angle of view for understanding and studying language. Similarly, as universal phenomena, hedges exist extensively in academic discourses. However, as a type of formal writing, academic discourse is characterized by correctness and clearness of its language, and by impersonality and preciseness of its viewpoints. Such characteristics have led to the traditional viewpoint on language that the main purpose of academic discourse is to convey information in an impersonal way, so the personal viewpoint is supposed to be avoided. As a result, not only the interactive debates among researchers but also the author's desire to persuade members of academic community and common readers to accept his/her claims has been ignored. In other words, traditional viewpoint on language loses sight of the interpersonal meaning embodied in academic discourse. In order to supplement the previous researches and to try a new cut-in point in linguistic study, this dissertation analyzes the hedges in academic discourses from the perspective of interpersonal meaning.With six articles from core journals in the field of linguistics as collected data, and with Prince et al's taxonomy of hedges, Brown& Levinson's face theory and framework of modality in systemic functional linguistics as theoretical background, this dissertation analyzes the interpersonal meanings realizes by such linguistic forms as lexical hedges, non-lexical hedges and numerical hedges. Analyses of lexical hedges are conducted on modal auxiliaries, epistemic verbs, adverbs and adjectives; analyses of non-lexical hedges are carried out on the phrasal and clausal levels respectively; numerical hedges can take different linguistic forms, so they are analyzed in a single section. Research findings indicate that hedges are closely related to objectivity of academic discourse, they can meet the demand of academic discourse for politeness, and furthermore, they accord with the negotiability of academic discourse. In other words, application of hedges in academic discourse helps the author of academic discourse express his/her respect to his/her peers, shows the author's desire to communicate with the readers, and at the same time, protects the author from being criticized. Based on the analysis, implications of studying interpersonal meaning of hedges in academic discourse have been revealed, which are mainly related to academic writing and teaching of academic reading and writing.