Interpersonal Meaning Of Hedges In The Golden Notebook

Clarity and precision is the main purpose when people use language to express their thought. While in fact, because of the complex communication atmosphere, the words that express uncertainty and possibility are working as an important communication strategy in practical communication between people. Since L.A.Zadeh, an American expert on cybernetics and mathematician, published his Fuzzy Set Theory in 1965, it has aroused a great impact on human cognition and provided people with a new viewpoint for the description of those fuzzy borders in human language, thus triggering the rapid development of a new branch in linguistics—Fuzzy Linguistics. In 1972, the concept of hedges was brought forth by Lackoff, who described hedges as "words whose job is to make things more or less fuzzy". As the most common and typical vague language, hedges provide a brand-new angle of view for understanding and studying language. Since then, linguists have made fruitful achievements in researches on hedges from perspectives of semantics, pragmatics, discourses and specific texts. In recent years, people gradually recognize the importance of vague language, and more and more linguists at home and abroad have carried out research on hedges from different perspectives. Most of the researches indicate that we can't simply use good or bad to evaluate vagueness; the most important is how we employ vague language to express our real intention. While up till now, there is comparatively lack of systemic research on hedges from interpersonal function. Systemic Functional Grammar holds that discourse is an interaction among social members. In my opinion, it is a significant job to analyze interpersonal meaning of hedges adopting Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar on modality as its theoretical framework. What provides the research possibility is the overlap between hedges and modality from semantic and pragmatic aspect and their language expressions. To associate hedges with modality we can gain a deeper understanding of hedges, especially its dynamic change from the pragmatic and discourse perspectives. Furthermore, with the help of the basic theories about modality in Halliday's Systemic Functional Grammar, we can also gain an insight into the interpersonal meaning of hedges from theoretical level. Only by putting hedges and modality in real context can we have a better understanding the meaning of them. Therefore, this thesis will adopt Systemic Functional Grammar to explore how the author employs vague language and hedges to express interpersonal meaning in The Golden Notebook, which is the masterpiece of Doris Lessing, the winner of the 2007 Nobel Prize for Literature. Through the analysis, we will find how the writer uses vague language and hedges in the context to construct its special narrating structure and portray the image of the protagonist Anna, thus finding the interpersonal communication between the author and the readers. Basing on the purpose of improving the students' comprehension of literary discourse, it will enhance their ability of second language acquisition. This thesis will analyze this unique language phenomenon from a relative special viewpoint- interpersonal meaning of hedges, with the hope to some contribution to vague language and hedges.