A Comparative Study Of Hedges In "China Daily" And "the New York Times" Business English News

The aim of this study is to examine the hedges used in business English newsfrom China Daily and The New York Times. It is carried out by adopting Lakoff’s(1972) definition and integrating Hyland’s (1998) and Varttala’s (2001) models onclassification of hedges. The following questions will be explored in this study:(1)What are the overall similarities and differences in hedges used in business Englishnews from China Daily and The New York Times?(2) What are the similarities anddifferences in the frequencies and distributions of various categories of hedges inbusiness English news from China Daily and The New York Times?(3) What are thepossible factors that have caused those differences?The data used in this study consists of two parts. The first part is30pieces ofbusiness English news chosen from the online edition of China Daily on website:http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/; the second part is30pieces of business English newsfrom the online edition of The New York Times on website: http://www.nytimes.com/.To guarantee the comparability of the two types of data, the business English newsselected in this study were issue-oriented.With the application of Antconc3.2.2.1and SPSS16.0, we calculate and comparethe frequency and distribution of hedges in the two types of data. Through analysis ofthe results, the author has following major findings: first, in terms of the overallsimilarities of hedges used in China Daily and The New York Times, both Chinesenative writers and native English writers tend to use the four subcategories of hedgesin the same pattern. For the overall differences, native English writers employ morehedges and they use hedges in a more various and flexible way; Second, there aresalient differences in using attribute hedges and writer-oriented hedges betweenChinese native writers and native English writers. Third, the possible factors that mayaffect the Chinese native writer’s use of hedges include following aspects: culturedifferences, language transfer, low awareness of hedges and complexity of hedges.