A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In Television Interview Talks

Hedge is one of the vague language phenomena, and plays an important role inlanguage communication, especially in television interview talks. Many scholars have beenengaged in exploring and studying on the topic of hedges. G. Lakoff first introduced theuse of hedge as a linguistic concept in1972(Lakoff,1972). From then on, the concept ofhedges has well developed from its original meaning, particularly since it has beenintegrated into semantics, pragmatics and discourse analysis. Wu Tieping is the firstscholar who introduced Zadeh’s fuzzy-set theory to China and the founder of the study ofhedges in China (Wu Tieping,1999). Scholars at home and abroad have done a lotcontribution to the researches about linguistic hedges.In recent years, owing to the development of the economic growth, televisioninterview talks have stepped into mass media and people’s life. In TV interview talks, boththe interviewer and the interviewee tend to adopt some communicative strategies. Hedgingis one of the most effective strategic devices to achieve communicative goals. Theresearches on vague language and its functions in English television interview talks havearoused the attention from linguists. However, hedges, as a significant part of vaguelanguage, have received little emphasis. There is still spacious room for further researcheson hedges in English television. Hence, the related study of linguistic hedges in televisioninterview talks from the perspective of pragmatics might be worthy to be spent more timeand energy.The present thesis chooses the English television interview talks “Yang Lan One onOne” as the data resources and concentrates mainly on the analysis of hedges in thisprogram from the pragmatic perspective under the theoretical framework of the majorpragmatic theories, Grice’s Cooperative Principle, Leech’s Politeness Principle and Brown&Levinson’s face theory. Particularly, in order to explore how hedges are employed andwhat functions hedges can perform in the interviews, the present research makes a diachronic and synchronic study on the distribution and application of hedges in “YangLan One on One” with quantitative and qualitative methods. Thirty pieces of interview areselected from the program throughout the recent thirteen years. After a pragmatic analysisof hedges in television interview talks, this thesis claims that hedges employed in languageinteraction can achieve at least eight positive pragmatic functions, such as increasing thecredibility and precision, enhancing face-protection, shortening the distance between thespeaker and the hearer, showing politeness and respect, etc. However, not all hedges canfunction properly. Hedges may also lead to certain negative functions if they are misusedin some way. Therefore, much attention should be paid to the proper use of linguistichedges in television interview talks.The present study attempts to improve the understanding of the linguistic hedges andhedging strategy in television interview talks, to help us to know how to use hedgesproperly, and to enhance the ability to use hedges as one of the most effectivecommunicating strategies in language interaction. The combination of the synchronic anddiachronic research methods adopted in this thesis might address this gap in existingresearch. In a word, this study of hedges in the English TV interview talks may be ofcertain theoretical and practical significance to pragmatics and language interaction.