Abstract:
English hedges have different pragmatic functions such as making English speeches mild, implicit and
effective. The proper use of English hedges in letters to shareholders, the most widely read part in the
corporate social responsibility report, can make language expression more implicit, polite, flexible and
achieve better business communication effects. Based on self-built business English corpus, this study
explores hedges as pragmatic strategies in the CEO’s letter to shareholders of Procter & Gamble from
2008 to 2018, in order to reveal the characteristics in the frequencies and patterns of hedges and
demonstrate what pragmatic effects are achieved by the differentiated use of each type of hedges in
the discourse. The study combined quantitative statistics with qualitative analysis. It was found that
plausible shields appear most frequently with a proportion of 38%, which are followed by rounders,
adaptors and attributing shields with a proportion of 34%, 24.6% and 2% respectively. The use of
hedges presents rich pragmatic effects, including improving the credibility, showing the politeness and
avoiding the financial responsibility of the speaker implicitly in the corpus. By analyzing the
application of fuzzy pragmatic strategies in the corpus of Procter & Gamble Company with specific
examples, this study focuses on the pragmatic function of hedges in business English discourse, in
order to help more companies understand the significance of hedges in business communication, so
that companies can make better use of hedges to achieve its commercial purpose, realize effective
communication, and promote corporate financing and development. |
