A Comparative Study Of Hedges In Diplomatic Languages Between China And America From The Pragmatic Perspective

It is known that vagueness is one of the intrinsic properties of natural language and exists widely in all aspects of language use. Hedges, as a member of vague language family, have aroused great interest among the scholars both at home and abroad during the past decades. The use of hedges is an effective strategy that diplomats often resort to in diplomatic activities to achieve certain purposes. Moreover, along with the quickening process of globalization and the rapid development of China's science and technology, China has become more and more important in communication with other countries in the world, which highlights the necessity of a cross-cultural comparison on hedges in diplomatic language.In present thesis, the author focuses on the comparative exploration of hedges in diplomatic languages between China and America in order to find out whether there are similarities or differences between them.5 pieces of American diplomatic speeches and 5 pieces of Chinese diplomatic speeches are collected respectively from websites. Adopting Prince et al.'s classification of hedges, this thesis conducts a quantitative analysis of frequency of four types of hedges with the collected materials. Some findings thus are concluded through comparison. The distribution of hedges presents that the four types of hedges are all applied in the two languages, but they are different in the preferred types of hedges. Comparatively speaking, the most favored type of hedges used by American diplomats is the shield, while Chinese diplomats have the preference to use the approximators.Meanwhile, the Adaptation Theory proposed by Verschueren is provided to analyze hedges in diplomatic language from pragmatic perspective. In fact, diplomats'choice of hedges is a kind of context adaptation. Through the materials collected, the realizations of different types of hedges are concluded and the pragmatic functions of hedges in diplomatic language are explored afterwards. Hedges are adopted to show politeness and save face, achieve accuracy and objectivity, and protect diplomats themselves in diplomatic language.To sum up, it is expected that this tentative thesis would shed some light on the better understanding of hedges not only in diplomatic language but also in daily communication.