A Contrastive Study Of Hedges In Chinese And American Corporations’ CSR Reports(2018-2021) From The Perspective Of The Adaptation Theory

As an indispensable part of discourses,hedges were first introduced by George Lakoff in 1972.Since then,many scholars have studied the hedges from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics with academic discourses,scientific discourses,and diplomatic discourses as their subjects.In recent years,the linguistics field began to realize the importance of studying the hedges in economic discourses.Generally speaking,only a few researches have been conducted on the hedges in CSR(Corporate Social Responsibility)reports,which can affect corporate image and its future development.Besides,many researches on the hedges in reports were confined to analyze only one industry at one time.In addition,the effect of the breakout of Covid-19 on the changes of corporates’ discourses has not yet been fully discussed.In this thesis,respectively 24 companies of China and America were selected from the top 500 companies listed by the Fortunes in 2021,the CSR reports of which during the years 2018 to 2021 were chosen as the research subject,and were self-built into six corpora for research data.Hedges are classified into content-oriented hedges,reader-oriented hedges,and quantity hedges by combining the taxonomies proposed by Hyland(1996)and Channell(1983).Both quantitative and qualitative analysis are employed in this thesis.To analyze hedges quantitatively,various hedges are searched through AntConc,the results of which are reported after being checked manually.Qualitative analysis is made mainly from the perspective of Verschueren’s(1999)Adaptation Theory.The thesis explores three research questions:(1)What are the similarities and differences in the frequencies and distributions of the hedges in Chinese and American corporations’CSR reports?(2)What are the similarities and differences in the frequencies and distributions of the hedges in Chinese and American corporations’ CSR reports after the appearance of Covid-19?(3)How does the adaptation theory explain the existence of hedges in Chinese and American corporations’ CSR reports?The results show that there exist large numbers of hedges in both Chinese and American corporations’ CSR reports and the overall distribution of them is similar.As to the standardized frequency,the frequency of all categories of the hedges in American CSR reports is higher than the Chinese counterparts.The distribution of realization devices of hedges is distinct from each other.To deal with Covid-19,both Chinese and American corporations increased the length of CSR reports rather than changing the standardized frequency of hedges.However,the distribution of various hedges in both countries’ CSR reports has changed after the pandemic.According to the Adaptation Theory,the usage of hedges in CSR reports is to adapt to temporal changes in the physical world,social relationship and public opinions in the social world,and desires and emotions of both writers and readers in the mental world.The thesis hopes to enrich the researches on the hedges in economic discourses.It also provides suggestions for Chinese corporations to edit their English version CSR reports and build a positive corporate image.