An Analysis Of Pragmatic Functions Of English Hedges

The phenomenon of fuzziness exists objectively and widely in all aspects of human life. In human languages, there are a great number of words expressing the concepts that have no clear-cut or definite boundaries, namely"fuzzy concepts". In 1965, Zadeh, a professor of California University, published his paper"Fuzzy Sets", which marked the appearance of this new branch of linguistics---fuzzy linguistics or fuzziology. Hedge is an important part of fuzzy language. The concepts of hedge and hedging were first introduced by Lakoff (1972) to describe"words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy"in her paper"Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concept". Hedging is an important strategy which is frequently used both in oral and written English. It indicates the speaker or writer's lack of an explicit and complete commitment to the truth value of a proposition, as well as the speaker or writer's unwillingness to make the commitment. In communication, hedges are often used to promote the acceptability of the discourse, making the discourse more courteous, persuasive and safer, and upgrading the expressiveness and flexibility of the discourse. Therefore, the appropriate use of hedging can reflect a person's proficiency and capability of the English.language.This paper explores the concepts, the semantic features, the linguistic realizations and classifications of hedging, presents an analysis of the functions with a pragmatic approach, and examines the epistemic reasons for the use of hedges and their pragmatic values and interpersonal functions, mainly according to Grice's co-operative principle, Brown and Levison's FTA theory and Leech's politeness principle. According to Grice's co-operative principle, in order to ensure the communication to go on smoothly, the participants must co-operate and adhere to some co-operative maxims. The speaker might use some hedges, and he observes one maxim but violates another at the same time for the purpose of appropriateness. Politeness principle is another important area reflecting the use of hedging. The use of hedging is also analyzed, based on the maxims of the politeness principle. Besides, the paper also points out some issues to be further discussed in the future, for example, the hedging devices in different fields, hedging in pedagogy of English and the cross-cultural hedging analysis, etc.