Semantics and pragmatics of hedges in English and Japanese

要旨

Hedges are expressions used to communicate the speaker's weak commitment to
\ninformation conveyed; i.e. by hedging, speakers may moderate the assertive force of
\ntheir utterances. They include sentence adverbials such as probably and technically,
\nadjectives such as regular and typical, particles such as ne and kedo in Japanese etc.
\nHedges crosscut parts of speech and therefore do not form a natural syntactic class.
\nThis thesis argues that existing analyses of hedging devices fall short of full
\nadequacy and presents a Relevance-theoretic account.
\nIn Chapter 1, I argue that hedging is a pragmatic phenomenon as the effect may be
\nderived via features of the ostensive stimulus other than encoded linguistic content;
\ne.g. the speaker can communicate her weak commitment by using certain prosodic
\nfeatures, facial expressions, shoulder shrugging etc. Discussions of hedging often
\narise in sociolinguistic contexts. However, I argue that the moderation of social
\nrelations such as the consideration of politeness is not its intrinsic function. The
\ninadequacy of existing analyses I point out in Chapter 1 is due to the lack of a
\nsufficiently articulated pragmatic framework, and for this reason, I turn to Relevance
\ntheory.
\nIn Chapter 2, I outline Relevance theory which provides a cognitively based
\nexplanation of communication. The theory makes rigorous distinctions between
\nencoded meaning and inferred meaning, between the explicit and implicit content of
\nan utterance, between descriptive and interpretive representations, etc. which provide
\nthe concepts necessary to isolate the semantics of the hedging devices as I explain in
\nChapters 3 and 4.
\nIn Chapter 3 and 4, I propose Relevance-theoretic analyses of particular English and
\nJapanese expressions, which appear regularly in the literature on hedging. I try to
\ncapture the intrinsic semantic content of these elements and show how the familiar
\nhedging effects arise as a result of the interaction between this encoded content, the
\nparticularities of context and considerations of relevance.

主題