A Study Of Hedges Used In English Newspaper Editorials And Academic Papers

Fuzziness is the basic attribute of language, and it is also the normal phenomenon of the real world. So language, as a tool to reflect the real world, is required to have a fuzzy feature. The study of hedges starts from the 1960s when L. A. Zadeh first proposed fuzzy sets to raise attention to hedges. From then on, scholars such as Lakoff, Meyer, Hyland and so on study hedges from the perspectives of semantics and pragmatics. At home, Wu Tieping published his article The Primary Research of Fuzzy Language in which he called it’’linguistic hedges". He took the lead in the study of hedge in China. Other linguistic scholars such as He Ziran, Chen Linhua, Li Fuyin and Su Yuanlian also take interest in the study of hedges.In recent years, the study of hedges mainly focuses on the study of genres such as English news reports, academic papers and court debates, but it rarely involves the comparison of the different uses of hedges in different genres. As editorials belong to argumentative essays, they are different from academic papers. Based on these two different genres, this thesis builds two corpora:the Newspaper Editorials Corpus (short for NEC) and the Academic Paper Corpus (short for APC). The editorials of the NEC come from the leading English and American newspapers such as The Guardian, The Daily Telegraph, The Washington Post and The New York Times, which contain 1.28 million tokens. The articles of the APC come from MicroConcord Corpus Collection B (short for MCB), which contains 1.01 million tokens.The author provides her own classification of hedges based on the model of Prince et al. (1980), Salager-Meyer (1994), Hyland (1998), Wu Tieping (1999) and He Ziran (2002), and then uses WordList of the WordSmith Tools 4.0 to retrieve the data and get the distribution of four sub-types of hedges in the two corpora. Two findings can be made from the statistics:a) hedges are popularly used in the English newspaper editorials and academic papers. Hedges account for 1.2% in the NEC and 1.3% in the APC. It can be concluded that academic writers are more likely to use hedges than editorial writers; b) the percentages of the four sub-types of hedges tell us that editorial writers are more likely to use adaptors and plausibility shields, while academic paper writers are more apt to use rounders and attribution shields. The reasons for the different use of hedges in the two corpora are:a) the different use of hedges caused by genre; b) the different use of hedges caused by objective; c) the different use of hedges caused by functions.Therefore, this study not only can narrow the gap in this field of hedge study, but also can help foreign/second language learners correctly understand the use of hedges in English reading and writing. What’s more, it also provides better reference for English teachers to guide students write their thesis more effectively.