Hedges In English, Chinese And Japanese Communication

Fuzziness or hedging is an intrinsic nature of human language. Hedge is a common phenomenon and plays an important role in our daily communication whether spoken or written. Hedge, as a member of the family of fuzzy language, is often employed for specific goals in communication. The concepts of hedge and hedging have been in the linguistic literature since the term hedge was introduced by G. Lakoff (1972) to describe"words whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy". Many linguists have been drawn to research on hedges/hedging and a lot of achievements have been made on the levels of semantics and syntax and there are some achievements on pragmatic level, but the researches are mainly on English hedges or hedging.When reading literature relevant to the study on hedges/hedging, in almost all papers whether published or unpublished, whether for a master degree or a doctorate degree, we will find such kind of statements as:"Hedging is a common phenomenon of human languages.";"Fuzziness is an intrinsic nature of language.";"People often use fuzzy expressions to describe things or express thoughts", etc. However, to the best of the author's knowledge, few researchers did research to illustrate or exemplify the universal nature– hedging/fuzziness, of human languages, although Wu Tie-ping, a Chinese linguist, tried English, Chinese and Russian. But he just focused on the fuzziness of words, very little on hedging/fuzziness in communication, which carries more weight to the study of hedges/hedging.This thesis attempts to study hedges by using the present linguistic theories in not only English, but also Chinese and Japanese communication, aiming at testifying and exemplifying hedging/fuzziness is a universality of human languages.The author begins with a brief introduction to fuzziness theory and the relevant study of hedge and hedging. Following this, a detailed analysis of the categorization of English, Chinese and Japanese hedges is done; a thorough discussion of the realization of English, Chinese and Japanese hedging is conducted. Then semantic features of hedges are touched. Lastly, more ink has been put on hedges and hedging from the pragmatic perspective by using the Cooperative Principle of Grice's Conversational Implicature Theory, Brown and Levinson's Face Threatening Acts Theory and Leech's Politeness Principle. In the last chapter, the author points out the limitations of this thesis which need further research.Based on the research in this paper, we find hedges and hedging performs many pragmatic functions in daily communication, among which the following are the most prominent: a) giving right amount of information; b) achieving politeness; c) saving face; d) avoid taking full commitment to the proposition. Also, we find whether in English, Chinese or Japanese, hedge and hedging do exist and perform almost similar functions, which implicates hedging is a universality of human languages.