Abstract: With the accelerating process of globalization, the continuous development of society, China plays a more and more important role in the world, and the G20 summit was held in HangZhou, attracting reports from domestic and international media, and there are still less study of the use of hedges based on the corpus, especially of the new events. This paper uses the corpus tool, (AntConc) study the frequency of hedges in corpus by qualitative and quantitative analysis. We can see that almost all Chinese reports about G20 summit is active and positive, but from the western media reports about the G20 summit and China, can be seen their views and attitudes, are both positive and doubtable even a little negative . It is suggested that those who do research the hedges to often use the corpus to analysis the fresh events.

Key words: G20 summit; hedge; approximator; shield; frequency

Contents

Abstract

摘要

1. Introduction-v

1.1 Background of study-1

1.2 Objective of the study-2

1.3 Significance of the study-3

2. Hedges-3

2.1 Definitions of Hedges-3

2.2 Classification of Hedges-4

2.2.1 Prince et al’s Model-4

2.2.2 Salager-Meyer’s Model-7

3. Corpus Building and Data Collection-8

3.1 The procedure of collecting news material and building corpus.-8

3.1.1 The procedure of collecting news material.-8

3.1.2 The Procedure of building corpus.-10

3.2 Data collection-10

3.2.1 Identifying hedges-10

3.2.2 Retrieval procedure-11

3.2.3 The frequency of the hedges-11

4. Data analysis and discussion-14

4.1 The frequency and percentage of hedges in data-14

4.2 The frequency and percentage of the classification of hedges-15

4.3 Similarities and differences of linguistic realizations in corpus and attitudes between the Chinese and western media.-16

4.3.1Approximators-16

4.3.2Shields-21

4.3.3 Similarities and differences between the Chinese and western media in corpus.-23

4.4 The attitudes and views from Western news media towards the G20 summit-24

5. Conclusion-25

References-29