A Comparative Analysis Of Hedges In Chinese And English News Reports

Fuzziness of language, a concept similar to the precision of language, is one intrinsic feature of natural language. Fuzzy expressions are of high frequency in daily communication and social intercourse. Since the fuzzy phenomenon has been discovered in language field, numerous scholars at home and abroad have made research and investigations on it from various perspectives.Hedges are regarded as an essential component of fuzziness of language. The notion of hedges was firstly introduced by the American linguist Lakoff in 1970s. Originally, hedges are part of semantic domain. Then, with the E. F. Prince's exemplification and classification of hedges, the study of hedges was from semantics to pragmatics. With the time pass by, with more scholars'attentions and interests, the scope of hedging research was expanded to many other fields,In the late 1980 to 1990, Chinese scholars began to move their eyes on hedges. Wu Tieping was the first person to study the fuzziness of language at home. There were also some other experts involved the studying of hedges. To review the recent studies, we found that most of the previous ones only focus on studying either English or Chinese hedges of their features, pragmatic function in a certain style. However, the study on hedges'stylistic functions, and the comparative study of hedges in two languages is far away from perfect, which needs to be further improved and completed.This paper, taking hedges in English and Chinese news reports as the subject, based on E.F. Prince's classification criteria, by adopting quantitative and qualitative analysis; it attempts to have a comparative analysis on hedges in English and Chinese news report. It aims to discover and discuss similarities and differences of hedges between English and Chinese in the perspectives of frequency and distribution type, and also to discuss linguistic realizations of hedges on two languages. Simultaneously, the potential reasons of the similarities and difference between two languages and interpersonal functions of hedges will analyzed. For one thing, it will assist people to adequately recognize hedges in the particular genre of news report. Furthermore, it will give some implications on English language teaching and learning.