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d differences in the use of hedges andboosters across different cultures and explain the reasons behind the cross-culturaldifferences, which can be supplementary to previous studies as well as provideimplications for future researches.

1.2 Purpose of the Study

Based on previous researches on hedges and boosters at home and abroad, thisthesis attempts to make a contrastive analysis of hedges and boosters used by differentcultural communities. The corpus for this study is 60 pieces of English economic newsselected from two mainstream news websites in western countries and China, including30 pieces from The Economist(https://www.economist.com/) and 30 pieces fromBeijing Review . By adopting a combined method ofquantitative study and qualitative study, the present thesis aims to achieve the followingobjectives.Firstly, the thesis aims to analyze the frequency, types and distribution of thehedges and boosters used in the corpus within the theoretical framework of Prince et al,Hyland and Peacock. While most of the previous studies have focused mainly on theuse of hedges, this thesis will also try to pay some attention to the use of boosters.Secondly, this thesis concludes the similarities and differences in the use of hedgesand boosters in native and non-native English economic news and discusses thepossible reasons for the similarities and differences.Thirdly, this thesis aims to enhance people’s awareness of hedges and boostersused in news reports and provide some pedagogical implications for both Englishlanguage learners and teachers.

1.3 Significance of the Study

Over the past three decades, fruitful results have been achieved in the studies ofhedges and boosters. Scholars at home and abroad probe into the use of hedges andboosters from various linguistic perspectives, such as semantics, pragmatics,sociolinguistics and discourse analysis. In recent years, empirical researches on the useof hedges and boosters in specific contexts have attained much attention. A growingbody of studies has been made to investigate how members from different language,cultural and disciplinary communities tend to employ these two metadiscourse devices.However, there is still some vacancy in terms of the cross-cultural or cross-linguisticdifferences in the use of hedges and boosters.Hedges and boosters, as two main categories of interpersonal metadiscourse, arefrequently employed by news writers to convince the readers. Although manyresearches have been carried out on the use of hedges and boosters in different genres,the economic news by writers from different countries constitute a relative new field ofstudy. Meanwhile, English is now widely acknowledged as an international language ofcommunication, when producing English texts, second language learner may feel theproper use of hedges and booster is a problem for them.The present study provides some evidence to how hedges and boosters are used innative and non-native English economic news, which will help Chinese news writersand readers to acquire a better knowledge of the hedging and boosting devices inEnglish news reports. This awareness of hedges and boosters can help readers betterunderstand the information conveyed by news writers. Besides, this thesis also aims toprovide some pedagogic suggestions for English teachers and learners in terms of theappropriate use of hedges and boosters in English texts.

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