A Contrastive Study Of Hedges In English Business News Written By Chinese And Native English Reporters

As the most typical fuzzy language, hedges arouse much interest among researchers abroad and at home. Though use of hedges has been studied from various perspectives, there is little research on the use of hedges in business news reports. News, as an effective medium of mass communication, is essential and necessary to people’s life. Generally speaking, news enjoys the features of accuracy, conciseness and objectivity, especially business news. However, these special properties can not prevent news writers employing hedges into business news reports. As a matter of fact, hedges are frequently used in business news reports.This thesis, based on the corpus of English business news written by native English reporters(EE corpus) and English business news written by Chinese reporters(EC corpus), is a contrastive study on the use of hedges in the two corpora, each of which consisting of thirty news reports respectively. Specifically, based on G. Lakoff’s definition of hedges, Prince et al.’s classification of hedges and Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the present study intends to answer the following four questions:(1) What types of hedges are frequently employed in business news reports?(2) What are the similarities and differences of hedges used in EE corpus and EC corpus?(3) How does the Adaptation Theory explain the existence of hedges in the two corpora?(4) What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in business news reports?The data used in this study are all gathered from authoritative and representative news websites, like New York Times(http://www.nytimes.com), The Washington Post(http://www.washingtonpost.com), and China Daily(http://www.chinadaily.com.cn), etc. Through the quantitative and qualitative analysis, the author has the following major findings.First, hedges are used at a relatively high frequency in business news reports whether written by native English-speakers or the Chinese reporters. All the four types of hedges are applied in business news reporting. Second, there are some similarities and differences of the use of hedges in EE corpus and EC corpus. In terms of the overall similarities, both in EE corpus and EC corpus, it is attribution shields that take up most hedges, and the least used hedges are plausibility shields. For the overall differences, the data show that hedges are more frequently employed in EE corpus than those in EC corpus. And the analysis of each type of hedges indicates that the preference of hedges in the two corpora is different. Third, within the framework of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, it is found that the employment of hedges in business news report is to adapt to physical world, mental world and social world. Fourth, the author finds that hedges in business news reports can perform some pragmatic functions, such as achieving accuracy, achieving objectivity, achieving politeness and achieving self-protection.