| Fuzzy language exists in every aspect of our daily life. Actually, fuzziness is the intrinsic nature of natural language and human mind. The notice of fuzzy phenomenon in language can be traced back to the Greek philosopher Eubulides in the4th century BC. But the formation of fuzzy theory is marked by the birth of the dissertation of L.A Zadeh, fuzzy set, which was published in1965in the8th edition of information and control. From then on, there has been a hot research on fuzzy theory at home and abroad, in various fields. And the study of language fuzziness is moving to its maturity. But most of them are on the basis of the Cooperative Principle of Grice and the Politeness Principle of Leech. While the studies of language fuzziness from the perspective of Verschueren’s adaptation theory are few, and those which are related with English news discourse are even fewer.News reporting is one of the most popular mass media in our daily life, which is also an important channel for people to acquire information. News reporting reflects the facts, so it is characterized with truthfulness, objectivity, and brevity, and among them, truthfulness is of primary importance. But we can find a lot of fuzzy language in news discourse. Why does news reporting which puts great emphasis on truthfulness allow ubiquitous existence of fuzzy language? The adaptation theory may help us to understand this phenomenon from a totally new perspective.Verschueren believes using language is a process of dynamic adaptation. Both speakers and interpreters make continuous choices. And the variability, negotiability and adaptability of language enable language users to make flexible choices. And he elaborates his adaptation theory from four dimensions, namely. Context Correlates of Adaptation. Structural Objects of Adaptability, Dynamics of Adaptability and Salience of Adaptation。And in this thesis, the writer mainly analyzes the language fuzziness in English news discourse from the dimension of Context Correlates of Adaptation. What is worth mentioning is that almost all the former researches, as far as I know, focus on the adaptation to mental world, social world and physic world, while the writer tries to analyze the adaptation process from one more perspective, the linguistic channel.The writer reviews and summarizes the former researches on language fuzziness both at home and abroad, distinguishes fuzziness, vagueness, ambiguity and generality, analyzes the main features of news. And the writer takes linguistic adaptation theory as the framework of this thesis, collects many news discourses as language materials from New York Times and China Daily, two representative mainstream newspapers from America and China, covering many fields such as politics, economics, technology. and military. The writer mainly chooses descriptive and interpretative qualitative research method to show how news reporters choose fuzzy language flexibly to make concrete adaptation to the physic world, social world, mental world, and the linguistic channel, which aims at showing the importance and necessity of fuzzy language in news discourse. Quantitative research method is also employed to show the ubiquity of fuzziness in English news discourse. The writer hopes to instruct language users to understand and use fuzzy language in news better, inspire the news readers to some extent, and makes some contribution to the future researches on fuzzy language phenomenon from the perspective of linguistic adaptation theory. |
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