A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In English Daily Conversation Guided By Adaptation Theory—a Case Study Of Desperate Housewives

As a vital member of the huge family of vague language, hedges play a fundamental part in human verbal communication. Originally defined by Lakoff, hedges have intrigued wide attention from many linguists at home and abroad. A general review of relevant literature indicates that hedges are explored from such fields as cognitive science and semantics and are expanded to many other fields like pragmatics, discourse analysis and so on. Many scholars mostly discuss hedges used in such written text as academic writing, news, ads and from perspectives of cognition, pragmatics, discourse analysis, etc. Some scholars explore hedges used in special context like courtroom language, classroom language and TV interviews. However, studies of hedges in the informal style--daily conversation are comparatively rare.Edified by this observation, this author attempts to investigate the causes and employment of hedges in daily conversation under the theoretical framework of Adaptation Theory, based on a small corpus made of one season of a popular comedy--Desperate Housewives. The author also endeavors to summarize certain regular features of hedges in English daily conversation.This research adopts qualitative method. First, in the light of Lakoff’s definition and Prince et all’s classification of hedges, the author manually identifies and classifies all hedges in the whole fifth season of DH, and then automatically counts and confirms the distributional patterns of each type and of those highly used ones within each type with a data-processing software. Next, this author chooses about fifty typical dialogues, analyzes hedges applied within and finds that participants selectionally adapt to certain contextual factors in the three dimensions: physical world, mental world and social world, and achieve specific communicative purposes with them.This research indicates:Firstly, in terms of frequency, plausibility shields and adaptors bear a distinctive advantage over the other two types, between which attribution shields occupy the least proportion. Secondly, to a high degree, contextual correlates are factors leading to the occurrence of hedges in DH, such factors as emotion, motivation, gender, age are the ones of widest and distinctive influences; Usually, each factor does not act alone, but rather, as one or more deciding factors, co-works with other factors to affect the employment of hedges. Thirdly, in daily conversation, hedges in use reveal some typical features lexically and grammatically:On lexical level, hedges in this informal style are mostly midget words with brief and simple spoken and written forms; some may have simpler variants or abbreviations; sometimes to accent emotions highly-efficiently, the repetition strategy can be adopted when necessary; collocations of hedges of the same or varied categories can better modify the proposition; occasionally, hedges can work as a mitigating device that fills in the utterance gap. On the syntactic level, some adverbial hedges allow its modified parts to be omitted and act themselves as a whole sentence; hedges used with past tense or/and progressing aspect are subtly different from hedges used in simple present form.