| Linguists hold the standpoint that hedges are used to modify and district some linguistic elements.In the process of language communication,employing hedges will make the language communication much flexible and realize the communicative goals easily.The disaster news has a quite close relationship with people's daily life and personal safety.According to the causes of disasters,researchers divide the disastrous events into natural and man-made disastrous events.Although the disaster news have a very high requirement to the accuracy of language,it is not difficult for readers to find that the news writers employ a number of hedges in their news releases.The main focus of this thesis is put on studying the pragmatic condition of hedges in Chinese and English disaster news from the perspective of pragmatics.Basing on the research aim,three research questions are come up with in this thesis: 1)What are the similarities and differences of the overall frequency and distribution of hedges in Chinese and English disaster news? 2)How does the Adaptation Theory explain the pragmatic condition of hedges in Chinese and English disaster news? 3)What are the similarities and differences of pragmatic functions that hedges act in Chinese and English disaster news?According to research questions,the writer of thesis chooses 30 disaster news separately from http://www.people.com.cn and http://www.bbc.com as the linguistic materials of this thesis,and makes the chosen linguistic materials build as two mini-corpora called the English Disaster News Corpus(EDNC)and the Chinese Disaster News Corpus(CDNC).Four disastrous events happened in China and abroad in 2015 are chosen in thesis: the case of European Refugees,the case of Paris Attacks,the case of Eastern Star and the case of Tianjin Bombing,which last from February,2015 to May,2016.This thesis chooses the taxonomy of hedges of Prince et al.as the mode of the study,analyses the using condition of the four categories of hedges in the two mini-corpora and calculates the frequency and percentage separately.According to the analytic results of data,the Adaptation Theory of Verschueren is applied to explore the pragmatic condition of hedges in Chinese and English disaster news.This thesis discusses the similarities and differences of pragmatic functions that hedges play in the Chinese and English disaster news.After giving a relative detailed analysis to the data,there are several findings: 1)There are a number of hedges existed in the Chinese and English disaster news,and the preference and choices of the four categories of hedges that the news writers of these two countries take are different as well;2)The pragmatic condition of hedges in Chinese and English disaster news is the results of adaptation to linguistic choices,three properties of hedges and three worlds;3)The same pragmatic functions that hedges act on disaster news are: make the language expression more polite;protect the news writers and avoid responsibility;ensure the accuracy and faithfulness of the disaster news;attract the attention and sympathy of the news readers.The different pragmatic functions that hedges play in disaster news are: understand different expressive ways and respect different cultural background.Basing on the above study,there are three suggestions to the comparative study of pragmatic functions of hedges in disaster news: 1)more authoritative definitions and classifications to hedges are looked forward to presented in the future;2)except the adaptation to context,more studies about using the other three parts of Adaptation Theory to explain hedges in disaster news should be done;3)pay more attention to the pragmatic functions of hedges in cross-cultural communication. |
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