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ule (2000)  and  other  scholars  (Channel,  2000;  Brown  &  Levinson,  1987;  Hyland,  1996)  also have their own claims. Halliday (1994) holds that hedges refer to the area of meaning that lies between yes and no. Yule (2000) believes that hedges are cautious notes expressed about how an  utterance  is  to  be  taken,  e.g.  so  far  as  I  know  is  used  when  giving  some  information. Channell  (2000)  defines  hedges  more  closely  that  hedging  refers  to  the  use  of  words  or expressions which encode the speaker’s or writer’s degree of commitment to the truth of what follows.  Brown  and  Levinson  (1987)  also  have  their  understanding  of  hedges.  They  regard hedges  as  a  particle,  a  word  or  a  phrase  which  can  modify  the  degree  of  membership  of  a predicate  or  a  noun  phrase  in  a  set.  Hedges  are  used  to  modify  words  to  make  expressions less fuzzy or fuzzier. Brown and Levinson (1987) also deem that hedges can be treated as a strategy to protect the speakers’ or hearers’ face for politeness. Hyland (1996) advances that hedges are the devices to realize hedging. The usage of hedges in language use just can show the speakers’ or writers’ propositions as opinions but not as the facts. In this study, Lakoff’s definition will be adopted. 
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2.2   Previous Studies on Hedges 
It is very easy to find vague language in different areas in the daily life. The concepts of vagueness,  fuzziness  and  hedges  are  a  little  similar  to  a  certain  extent.  Vagueness  is  an intrinsic characteristic of natural language. It refers to that there is no fixed boundary, no clear cut  of  membership  and  they  are  the  unclear  or  uncertain  utterances  or  expressions.  When people  do  not  tend  to  express  things  clearly  or  accurately,  they  prefer  to  employ  vague language. As for the difference of fuzziness and vagueness, fuzziness is a lot more technical than vagueness in linguistics. It is just a matter of personal preference and inclination. There are  large  quantities  of  realizations  of  vagueness  in  language  use  at  different  levels.  For example,  at  the  lexical  level,  there  are  mainly  three  forms  of  realization:  hedges,  general words and abstract words. Also, hedges are the most typical realization of vagueness, which play a significant and irreplaceable role. Hedges  are  becoming  more  and  more  important  and  have  been  studied  with  different focuses.  In  1970s,  hedges  were  studied  in  terms  of  semantics.  And  the &n本论文由英语论文网提供整理，提供论文代写，英语论文代写，代写论文，代写英语论文，代写留学生论文，代写英文论文，留学生论文代写相关核心关键词搜索。