A Comparative Study Of Hedges In Chinese And The US Foreign Ministry Spokespersons' Remarks From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Hedges are words,phrases or expressions that make things fuzzier or less fuzzy.There are a great number of hedges used in various genres of language studies.However,previous studies in diplomatic fields are insufficient.This thesis conducted a comparative study of hedges based on Verschueren's Adaptation Theory,adopting both quantitative and qualitative methods with the aim of finding out the features,similarities and differences between the use of hedges in Chinese and US Foreign Ministry spokespersons' remarks,using two self-complied corpora-CFMSRC and USFMSRC.Possible reasons for the differences are further analyzed.The adaptation to the mental,social,and physical worlds through hedges in Foreign Ministry Spokespersons' remarks is also analyzed in this thesis.The results show that hedges are widely used in both corpora.The occurrence of hedges in USFMSRC is more frequent than that in CFMSRC.The US FMSs prefer approximators,whereas the Chinese FMSs prefer shields.The most frequently used hedges are plausibility shields in both corpora.In addition,the essence of employing different types of hedges in FMSR is the realization of context adaptability to achieve the communication goals.This study provides useful reference and enlightenment of hedges used in diplomatic language for Chinese English learners.