The Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In American Joumalistic English

Hedges, as one important part of fuzzy language family, have drawn the attention of linguists from the beginning of 1960s. In 1965, L.A Zadeh first interpreted linguistic hedges in terms of his fuzzy-set theory in his article Fuzzy Sets. In 1972, G. Lakoff first introduced the concept of hedges in his article Hedges: A Study In Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts, defining them as"words whose functions are to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy"(Lakoff, 1972:195) and analyzed hedges mainly from semantic aspects. Then the concept of hedges began to move into pragmatic and discourse areas in the 1980s. Prince, Frader and Bosk(1982) analyze hedges from the pragmatic dimensions and divide hedges into approximators and shields. Some scholars in our country also have done some researches on hedges since 1980s, such as Wu Tieping, He Ziran,etc.As a mass medium, news influence people's life deeply, and American journalistic English, as one important part of news language, has its own characters in lexical and syntactic aspects. News English requires the expressions to be objective, timely and accurate, while hedges get the features of indirectness, cancelability, markedness and indefiniteness. From the pragmatic perspective, hedges in journalistic English have certain positions and characteristics.The data selected include forty excerpts chosen randomly from the reports in Time and Newsweek, and involve four news types, that is, political news, social news, business news and art news. The thesis elaborates the categories and characteristics of hedges from the pragmatic dimension depending on the hedging devices employed. From the different frequency of hedging devices in different news types of American journalistic English, the author finds that hedges especially lexical hedges appear frequently in American journalistic English; and the frequency of hedges in social news is the highest because of its special features. The pragmatic analysis of hedges is concerned with cooperative principle and conversational implicature, which can explain the reasonable use of hedges in American journalistic English, and hedges in American journalistic English may flout or observe the maxims of cooperative principle, acting unique pragmatic functions in news discourse, and hedges can also get special conversational implications in news. The employment of hedges in journalistic English is just for the strategies of calculation, being objective, being brief and self-protection. At last the study implies that the understanding of the employment of hedges can improve the abilities of journalistic English learning and teaching and enrich the communicative skills.