The pragmatic development of hedging in EFL learners

摘要: This cross-sectional study distances itself a bit away from the traditional crosscultural and contrastive interlanguage pragmatics, to go beyond speech acts discourse investigate EFL learners’ pragmatic development in hedging, an ability mitigating or discourse. 211 Chinese Mainland students at junior-high, senior-high, university levels participated study, data were collected with open written questionnaires, oral interviews, organized debates. Results show that major hedging categories elicited learners are quantificational approximators, performative shields, modal pragmaticmarker hedges, other syntactic discoursal strategies. While each category develops its own way, these have shown sequential developmental pattern, roughly simplified as route starting I think, pragmatic-marker finally arriving hedge clusters. Their sociopragmatic awareness also along their pragmalinguistic devices: early stage tend emphasize rather than mitigate discourse, which gradually gives way incongruent combination of intensifiers mitigators, showing increased but incompetent system. It is level develop both high congruent harmonic Therefore, effect increases over stages, even higher stage, merely medium ranged. In spite developments, habitually fall back on think few top hedges (e.g., maybe), regardless proficiencies. has been characterized one most distinctive features for perhaps use hedges. However, dependency decreases English proficiency increases, suggesting gaining chances develop.