4.1.1 Similarities in Frequency of Hedges    8
4.1.2 Similarities in Lexical Items    10
4.2 Differences of Hedges in Selected English and Chinese Political News Reports    11
4.2.1 Differences in Classification of Hedges    11
4.2.2 Differences in Model Verbs of Hedges    12
4.3 Reasons for the Similarities and Differences in the Use of Hedges    14
4.3.1 Reasons for Similarities in the Use of Hedges    14
4.3.2 Reasons for Differences in the Use of Hedges    15
5 Conclusion    16
 References........18
A Contrastive Analysis of Hedges in English and Chinese Political News Reports
1    Introduction
Most scholars have been paying their attention to the preciseness of expressions rather than fuzziness. Moreover, with the development of more precise manners adopted in science and technology, a great number of people insist that preciseness is superior to fuzziness, while fuzziness is received as an inferior term. In fact, the phenomenon of fuzziness not only exists in objective things, but also appears in natural language. At this point, we can infer that both preciseness and fuzziness are two primary phenomena coexisting in natural language. The expressions of fuzziness are necessary for people when people communicate with other people or engage in social activities. Therefore, the phenomenon of fuzziness, just like preciseness, is one inherent feature of natural language.
Political news reports are the main way to know political events, so the usage of hedges in the political news is an important subject which is worth further research.
The paper is based on the previous scholars’ research on fuzzy language, select many examples of political news reports online as research materials. Comparison and contrast are used to discuss hedges in Chinese and English news reports.
The research on hedges in political news reports is good to both authors and readers. On the one hand, the authors/writers with more awareness of fuzziness will have various means and be efficient in writing. Meanwhile, hedges play a great role in keeping political news reports precise, objective, flexible, and reliable. On the other hand, the readers who have a good knowledge of hedges will better understand the implied meanings conveyed by the writers when reading. Broadly speaking, with a comparative analysis of hedges in both English and Chinese, it is of great benefit for us to get a much deeper cognition of the characteristics and specific patterns of hedges in order to understand the fuzzy phenomenon in natural language. From the perspective of teaching and learning, having a good knowledge of hedges could help us to increase the ability of linguistic performance and express something in a more acceptable way. Besides, much more attention should be paid on the hedges in order to develop reading and writing abilities of language learners. 中英政治新闻报道中模糊语的对比研究(2):http://www.youerw.com/yingyu/lunwen_47851.html