摘要

  自从美国语言学家Lakoff 在1972年首次提出了模糊限制语的概念后，许多语言学家开始从各个角度对其进行了大量研究，近来研究从语义学转向了社会语言学、语用学、话语分析及语篇分析的领域。新闻，作为大众传媒之一，在社会生活当中起着重要作用，也因此成为近年来的研究热点。但是目前对政治新闻中模糊限制语现象的研究相对较少，而政治新闻中存在大量的模糊限制语颇具有研究价值。本文从模糊限制语的定义及分类开始，通过对随机抽样的有限语料进行定性研究，继而分析英国报纸《卫报》和美国报纸《纽约时报》中的政治新闻的模糊限制语的语用功能。结果表明，模糊限制语对概述信息、精确信息、自我保护和体现礼貌都有着积极的影响。

关键词：模糊限制语；英语政治新闻；语用功能

Abstract

Since Lakoff, an American linguistician, first put forward the notion of “hedge” in 1972, many other scholars have started a lot of researches in hedges from various perspectives. Recent years have seen a diversion of researches from the field of semantics to those of sociolinguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis and text analysis. News, as a kind of mass media, plays an important role in social life and thus becomes a hot spot for researches. However, there is relatively few research in hedges in political news up to now. It is worthwhile to study the considerable hedges existing in political news. This thesis begins with the definitions and classifications of hedges, then limited corpus of a random sampling of political news will be analyzed and finally the pragmatic functions of hedges in political news issued by The Guardian released in Britain and New York Times in America will be analyzed. The results show that hedges have positive influence on generalizing information, making information accurate, providing self-protection and achieving politeness.

Key word: Hedges; English political news; Pragmatic functions