A Corpus-based Study of Hedges in Mandarin Spoken Discourse
Date Issued
2008
Date
2008
Author(s)
Chen, Yi-Ting
Abstract
This corpus-based study explores how hedges are empirically manifested in Mandarin talk-in-interaction and how their patterns reflect the existing pragmatic grounds. edges have become one of the subject matters within the study of vagueness since George Lakoff (1973: 471) relate the term “hedge” to expressions “whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy.” More and more scholars interest in its manifestations and functions. The concept of hedges are widened in the field of pragmatics, in which hedges are used to encode speaker’s degrees of less than full commitment to the truth of a proposition in a broad sense. owever, most discussions about hedges are theoretical and few efforts have been made to probe into how it manifests itself in real use of language. Or most studies on hedges are conducted based on English. Owing to the lack of empirical evidences in Mandarin, this study sees the need of looking into the authentic data and empirically investigates how hedges manifest themselves in naturally occurring spoken discourse. pecifically, we examine hedging representations in different linguistic categories. Among all lexical hedges, adverbs is the most frequent used categories of hedges, while speakers most often employ the linguistic item shenme as a lexical hedging device. Furthermore, speakers tend to combine more than one lexical hedges in their utterances, in which lexical hedges reinforce their hedging function harmonically. Speakers would also employ syntactic patterns and personal or impersonal attribution as hedging devices to make utterances with low level of commitment. oreover, it is argued that the exploitation of hedges is pragmatically motivated by (inter)subjectivity. On the one hand, speakers employ hedges to clearly express their attitudes or stance and then show subjectivity in utterances. On the other hand, the exploitation of hedges is grounded on the social concern of politeness. Speakers use hedges not only to seek to be approved of and to avoid disagreement, saving their positive face, but also simultaneously protect themselves from possible imposition of oppositions or criticisms, saving their negative face. A hearer’s negative face is also saved by exploitation of hedges since they soften the force of the utterance, minimize the imposition on hearers, and increase the chance of ratification. verall, this empirical study shows the manifestation of hedges and the patterning of them in spoken Mandarin discourse, demonstrating that their exploitations are pragmatically motivated. With this empirical study, we know how hedges function as both positive and negative politeness strategy at the same time.
Subjects
hedges
subjectivity
intersubjectivity
politeness
face
politeness strategy
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