A Comparative Study On Hedges Used In Chinese EFL Students' And English Native Speakers' Conversations

The concept of'hedges'was first introduced by G. Lakoff in1972. He defined'hedges'from the point of view of language philosophy as follows:"For me, some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose meaning implicitly involves fuzziness—words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. I will refer to such words as'hedges'". As an important part of fuzzy language, hedges have many pragmatic functions in communication. They can be used to convey assumptions about the speaker's beliefs, express speaker's degree of commitment to a proposition, and make personal evaluation more indirectly. In addition, hedges can also be used to serve social functions such as engendering camaraderie and softening implicit criticisms. They are closely related to many important pragmatic theories and principles such as conversational implicature, cooperative principle and politeness principle. Using hedges properly, speakers can make their utterances more flexible and more polite, thus carrying out communicative tasks more smoothly.In order to evaluate Chinese EFL students'ability of using hedges and improve their language skills, the author of this thesis has conducted a contrastive analysis of hedges in two self-compiled corpora, namely, native speakers'conversations (NSC) corpus and Chinese EFL students'conversations (CSC) corpus. This comparative study provides both qualitative and quantitative information concerning the incidences, the categories and distribution of hedges in both corpora. Meanwhile,the functions of various kinds of hedges have also been discussed. The findings clearly indicate that the hedges used in CSC shares some similarities with those in NSC, but the differences between them outweigh the similarities. The major difference is that hedges used in CSC Corpus are fewer than those in NSC Corpus both in quantity and in variety. The reasons may be diverse, but Chinese students'linguistic knowledge, linguistic competences and L1 influence are the three major factors. In the end, this thesis also provides some suggestions and implications so as to raise Chinese EFL students'awareness of hedges and improve their communicative skills.