Summary of Hedge and Modality Study.doc

Summary of Hedge and Modality Study Summary of Hedge and Modality Study I. Introduction Vagueness is one of the essential features of natural languages and phenomena of fuzzy language exist everywhere in our daily life. When people can?t make sure of what they are saying, they often employ vague language to express their opinions on some occasions, and in this way they can make the communication continue smoothly. Since 20th century, researchers at home and abroad have made widespread studies on vague phenomena in language use, and hedges, as an important member of vague language, have also been studied broadly. This article is a summary of current studies of hedge and modality mainly about the definitions, classifications and pragmatic realization and functions. II. Literature Review In 1965, Lofti A. Zadeh published an article Fuzzy Sets. Influenced by him, G. Lakoff first introduced the notion 揾edge?in his famous article Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts (1972:195) to mean 搘ords whose job is to make things fuzzier (or less fuzzy)? Since then, the use of hedge has been studied by many other researchers as an important pragmatic phenomenon from various perspectives. The study shifted to social linguistics, pragmatics, discourse analysis, and text analysis. Hedges may intentionally or unintentionally be employed in both spoken and written language since they are crucially important in communication. And hedges help speakers and writers communicate more precisely the degree of accuracy and truth in assessments. In reality, hedges are usually considered as a pragmatic strategy. In recent years, the study of h