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hedges used by foreign language learners, abroad and domestically. 

2.1   Definitions of hedges and hedging 
Hedging is one typical language phenomenon in English. Lakoff first put hedge up as a creative concept in  1972. After that, many other linguists (e.g. Lakoff, 1972; Prince,  et  al,  1982)  gave  their  views  on  hedges  provide  different  definitions  and categorizations. Those early studies pay much attention to meanings of hedges in the semantics,  whereas  later  the  studies  of  them  from  a  pragmatic  perspective  attract growing  concern  of  scholars.  They  believe  that  hedges  are  made  up  of  numerous adverbs  and  prepositional  phrases,  and  in  some  extent  hedges  change  the  truth  value of the proposition and most frequently ordinate utterances with indirect expression. As  for  the  function  of  hedges,  Zadeh  (1965)  points  out  that  the  function  of hedges is to restrict the fuzziness of vague concept, whereas Lakoff (1972) argues that “words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy.” He gives, as an example of what he means, the way we might talk about birds. Eagles, for example, are birds; so are sparrows, magpie, but what about, for instance, a chicken? As Lakoff suggests, we might find ourselves saying: “A chicken is a sort of bird.” That “sort of” is a hedge. However,  this  concept  is  not  clear  enough  to  be  understood.  Since  then increasing  linguists  define  hedges  again  from  various  perspectives.  Brown  & Levinson  (1987)  regards  hedges  as  the  particle,  words  or  phrases  who  can  partly change  the  truth  value  of  the  proposition  under  a  certain  condition.  Channel  (1994) defines hedges as words or expressions used by speakers or writers to present the truth degree of the utterance. In Contemporary Linguistics Dictionary, it defines hedges as a  group  of  words  to  express  uncertainty  or  restrict  a  condition,  usually  used  in pragmatics  or  discourse  analysis.  Whereas  Verschueren  (1999)  treats  hedges  as  a meta-language  and  meta-discourse,  such  as  “true,  real,  so-called”  and  so  on. 
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2.2   Classifications of hedges 

L.A.  Zadeh  (1972)  did  a  simple  classification  of  hedges,  and  more  and  more linguists have classified hedges from different perspectives. In  the  term  of  pragmatics,  Prince,  et  al  (1982)  and  Hyland  (1997)  make  their classifications  of  hedges,  of  which  the  category  is  popular  among  hedges  studies.  In aspect  o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。