ose studiesare primarily about classification of hedges used by English writers and non-nativeEnglish writers, or investigating the similarities and differences of making statementsof interpersonal metadiscourse in different degree, focusing on one specific part,abstract(Jalilifar,2007a;Jalilifar,2007b; Swale,1990; Hyland,2000), and even somecomparative studies between English and non-native writers in certain fields likemedical English, natural science, biology etc( Salager Meyer,1994; Hyland,1998a).Some studies have conducted on hedging in the causal or oral discoursecontext(Coates, 1987), and some studies have conducted on the cross-linguistic in thefield of literature like Mahmound Samaie, et al(2014).
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Definitions of Hedges
Hedging, as the nature of language, was first mentioned by Peirce(1902:748),who is the first person to study the hedging nature of language. The concept of FussySets is originated from Zadhn’s(1965:339) work, which was defined as “a class inwhich the transition from membership to non-membership is gradual rather thanabrupt”. Gradually, in the field of linguistics, some subjects have appeared, like thehedging linguistics, hedging semantics, and hedging language semantics, etc. In the1970s, the hedging language has drawn Lakoff’s attention. It is Lakoff who makes agreat contribution to the concept construction of hedging, and defines hedges as those“ words whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy”(1972:195). Hedges, asthe academic term, first appears in his revolutionary paper named “Hedges: a study inmeaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts”(Lakoff, G, 1972). Later, thesemantic functions of hedges interest him a lot, and thus he conducts research onwords which can decrease the membership of things, words like rather, sort of , kindof, etc.With the development of hedging on the aspects of pragmatics and discourseanalysis, its concept has been extended from the purely semantic one to bothpragmatic one and semantic one. In this way, more scholars have a tendency to definehedging from a functional aspect. Among them, Brown and Levinson (1978:145) tryto explain hedging as the phenomenon of politeness. They claim that hedges are usedto convey the meaning of illocutionary force of speech acts, and mainly to reduce thestrength. Thus, hedging is employed as a strategy to protect the hearers’ faces frombeing threatened.
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2.2 Classifications of Hedges
Due to the fact that there is no such a definition that scholars agree on, thus thestudy on hedging has aroused scholars’ great interests, and different taxonomies ofhedges have been given, corresponding to various definitions of hedges. While, just aswhat has been mentioned the advantages and disadvantages of various definitions ofhedges, the various divisions of hedges will also have their merits and demerits. In thefollowing part, different kinds of taxonomies of hedges will be showed.When Zadeh(1972) first gives the concept of hedging in his work “A FuzzySet”, he also mentions that the hedges could be divided into two categories from semantic perspective. The first category includes words like very, more or less, much,highly, slight, etc, which are used to modify fuzzy words. The second categoryincludes words like essentially, actually, regular, technically, etc, which are used to bethe representations of the patterns in which the unites of fuzzy words are modified.
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Chapter Three Methodology.....18
3.1 Research Questions......18
3.2 Research Instrument.....18
3.3 Data Collection.....19
3.3.1 Data Sources...... 19
3.3.2 Criteria for the Identification of Hedges..........20
3.3.3 Processing Procedures.......23
Chapter Four Results and Discussion.......25
4.1
