Abstract—This paper presents an analysis of hedges in
Chinese environmental news commentaries. The study focuses
on the way in which hedges contribute to achieving persuasion
in texts and promoting pro-environmental awareness among
readers. First, a quantitative approach was applied to identify
the distribution of hedges in 30 texts of environmental
commentaries from People’s Daily. Second, a textual analysis
was conducted to explore how hedges enhanced ethos, pathos,
and logos to achieve persuasion. Research results reveal that (1)
authors used a high percentage of epistemic adjectives/adverbs
(318, 50.56%) and modal verbs (206, 32.75%); (2) hedges
contributed to enhancing ethos, pathos, and logos through
establishing a negotiable persona, generating resonance, and
strengthening reason and logic. This study provides an
innovative angle of understanding hedges in journalistic
discourse and extends existing knowledge on strategic
environmental communication with hedging devices.
Index Terms—Chinese news commentary, hedge, persuasion,
pro-environmental.
Luying Zhang and Yang Chen are with the College of Humanities and
Social Sciences in Harbin Institute of Technology, Shenzhen, China (e-mail:
19S059004@stu.hit.edu.cn, drchenyang@hit.edu.cn).
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Cite:Luying Zhang and Yang Chen, "Strategic Pro-environmental Persuasion: Use of Hedges in Chinese Environmental Commentary," International Journal of Languages, Literature and Linguistics vol. 6, no. 3, pp. 155-161, 2020.