A Corpus-based Study On Hedges In TEM-8 Spoken English

Vague language exists in all human languages.Since the linguist Lakoff proposed this concept in 1972,hedges have been a hot topic in vague linguistics.Many scholars focus on and study hedges widely from different perspectives,such as the perspective of semantics,pragmatics,discourse,rhetoric etc.However,the previous researches are single,mostly confined to written language.There are only a few researches of hedges in verbal communication.The particularity and importance of hedges in verbal communication has not yet attracted enough attention from English teachers and learners.Overuse,underuse or inappropriate use of hedges can lead to awkward silence or disharmony and even failure in verbal communication.In view of this,the study focuses on comparison and analysis on the use of hedges between Chinese English learners and English native speakers in verbal communication and attempts to figure out answers to the following questions: firstly,what are the highest frequency's hedges used in TEM-8 spoken English? Secondly,what are the similarities and differences of the use of each category's hedges? Thirdly,what are the reasons for differences? Fourthly,how should Chinese English learners grasp the use of hedges accurately?In order to achieve the above goals,this study adopts Contrastive Interlanguage Analysis,takes COCA as a reference corpus and SECCL as a learners' corpus and compare and analyze the similarities and differences on the use of hedges between Chinese English learners and American native speakers in depth.This study employs the classification of Price et al..61 most commonly used hedges are selected based on previous other studies and they are input into the two corpora to retrieve their frequencies.The frequency distribution obtained in the two corpus is compared and analyzed.For further study of each category,six hedges with the highest frequency in each category are selected for further comparative analysis.Through comparative analysis,we have some findings.Firstly,Chinese learners and native speakers share some similarities on the use of hedges.They both use hedges largely in verbal communication.The frequency of shields is higher than that of approximators in both corpora.It proves that,as a whole,Chinese learners have the same tendency as native speakers on the use of hedges.Secondly,more distinct differences exist in the two corpora.On the overall frequency,the frequency of hedges used by Chinese learners is much higher than that of hedges used by native speakers.The further study found that the reason is that Chinese learners overuse some hedges like I think,must,can,should etc.But on the other way,some hedges are scarcely used.Based on the above findings,this study analyzes the causes of these differences from the aspects of second language level,cultural difference,occupation and context,gender and age.At last,some teaching suggestions are put forward.