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Chapter One Introduction

1.1 Background of the research
Vagueness is a substantial feature of all natural language. However, there were notso many scholars focused on it until the 20thcentury. In 1965, the famous Americanscientist L. A. Zadeh put forward the fuzzy-set theory which paved the fundamentalway for the vagueness research. From then on, more and more scholars took interest invagueness and they paid attention on vagueness from many different disciplines, suchas mathematics, psychology, literary criticism, logics, philosophy, linguistic and so on.Hedges were regarded as the most common and characteristic representation invague language. (Chen & Wen, 1996). The notion of hedges was first put forward byG. Lakoff in 1972. He pointed out that “hedges are those words whose job is to makethings fuzzier or less fuzzy”. At that time the concept of hedges has been built inlinguistics. From then on, in the field of linguistics, many researchers (Rosch, 1973;Hubler, 1983; Channell, 2000; Hyland, 1998, 2000; Wu, 1999 etc.) have investigatedthis language phenomenon in many different subfields, such as sociolinguistics,psycholinguistics, semantics, discourse analysis and pragmatics. In these subfields,hedges have been investigated from many different perspectives. Since the 1980s, “thefocus of hedges research has shifted to genre-based contextual framework, with hedgesin LSP(Language for Specific Purposed) texts being studied in an extensive, multi-dimensional way” (Wang, 2005). Nevertheless, scholars have paid a little attention tothe hedges in broadcasting news language which emphasizes truthfulness and accuracy.The present study, which tries to provide an explanation of hedges in Englishbroadcasting news from the perspective of Verschueren’s Linguistic Adaptation Theory,makes full use of previous studies as Reference and will be considered as enrichment tothem.
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1.2 Purpose of the study
The first purpose of this thesis is to prove that hedges abound in Englishbroadcasting news. News is defined as the information concerning recent events orhappenings which are especially reported by newspaper, radio, periodicals, ortelevision (The American Heritage Dictionary of the English language 2002). As one kind of news, the language of English broadcasting news, is requested to be objective,accurate and concise. Nevertheless, G. Lakoff holds that hedges are those words whosejob is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. It seems that hedges can not exist in Englishbroadcasting news. So whether the hedges do abound in English broadcasting news isone of the aims which this study will investigate.The second purpose of this thesis is to analyze the reasons why news reporters usehedges in English broadcasting news. If hedges do exist in English broadcasting news,why reporters use them is another question which this thesis tries to answer. The studywill show that the employment of hedges in English broadcasting news is to adapt tovarious contextual correlates, such as physical world, mental world and social world.The last purpose of this thesis is to present a systematical analysis of the hedges’special pragmatic functions in English broadcasting news. Hedges have particularinfluences on language and they are used widely, not only in written language but inspoken language as well. We can see hedges in journalistic language, diplo本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。