Hedges In English And Chinese Diplomatic Language

Hedge is one of the members of fuzzy language. In1972, Lakoff presented that“hedge is the words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy”. Hedges arousedgreat interest of scholars at home and abroad in the past forty years. Many linguists, fromthe rhetoric, stylistics, pragmatics, systemic functional linguistics and translation approach,have studied the hedge. In recent years, many have been done on the hedges withRelevance Theory, but they are mostly on the hedges in daily communication, law,literature works and so on. In this thesis, the author analyzes the hedges in English andChinese diplomatic language from the perspective of Relevance Theory, with a view toanswering the following questions:(1) Do hedges exist in both English and Chinese diplomatic language?(2) How can Relevance Theory explain the hedges in English and Chinese diplomaticlanguage?(3) What’s the pragmatic function of hedges in English and Chinese diplomaticlanguage?This thesis analyzes hedges in English and Chinese diplomatic language throughmethods of literature review, contrastive analysis, induction and deduction, with pressconference, speech and celebrity interview in diplomatic language being corpus. The authoranalyzes the linguistic realization of hedges in English and Chinese diplomatic language,which illustrates the hedges at the lexical level and non-lexical level. It explores that thehedges abound in English and Chinese diplomatic language and have many similarities. Itdemonstrates the hedges are universality of human language from the aspect of English andChinese diplomatic language.In the thesis, the author applies Relevance Theory as the theoretical framework, toanalyze how the diplomat achieves his purpose with hedges, and how the listener get theoptimal relevance by inferring. The research findings show that hedges in English andChinese diplomatic language don’t reduce the accuracy of language use. But they help thelisteners to indentify context and reduce the efforts made by the listeners in the process ofutterance understanding and inferring. Then the listeners find the relevance among utterances so as to understand communicative intentions correctly and achieve the purposeof successful communication.What’s more, from the perspective of pragmatics, hedges not only in Englishdiplomatic language but also in Chinese diplomatic language have rich pragmatic functions.They are establishing a desired image, easing tension, being self-protection and so on. Thus,we can get the deep reasons why hedges exist in English and Chinese diplomatic language.