A Study Of Linguistic Hedges In Political Speeches

Fuzziness or vagueness is a natural phenomenon existing in all aspects of the natural world as well as in human brain and language. However, fuzziness in language is always thought of being so "bad" that it should be avoided. It was not until in 1965 when Zadeh first put forward the fuzzy set theory that fuzziness was re-recognized as a linguistic research area. Hedges, defined by Lakoff as "words whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy", which help to bring fuzziness into language, came to linguists' research scope ever since. Since the 1970s, hedges have been studied from various angles and from almost every possible perspective: semantically (Lakoff and Zhangqiao), psychologically (Rosch), and pragmatically (Frazer, Kasper, Brown/ Levinson, and Li Qianju). In the 1990s, linguists began to explore hedges in interactions and specific text genres: Hyland gives a comprehensive description of hedges in scientific research articles (1998).This paper mainly focuses on the features and metafunctions of hedge in political speeches. This thesis includes six parts: an introduction, four chapters and a conclusion: The Introduction presents the research questions and significance of this study; Chapter One intends to get the readers familiar with the linguistic term: hedge, and to trace the research histories and status quo of hedges; Chapter Two is a theoretical framework for further study; In Chapter Three the author tries to analyze features of hedges in political speeches; The fourth chapter gives a comprehensive analysis of the metafunctions of hedges in political speeches.Political speeches, addressed by politicians on important or serious occasions, are characterized by strong political tendency with rigid logic and arousing force. Hedges especially modal verbs are frequently adopted by politicians in delivering speech to satisfy their purposes and to create a sense of power, confidence and conviction. Through collecting the frequencies and distributions of hedges in the corpus (made up of 20 political speeches), the author finds out that hedging is a highly situation dependent phenomenon, and that epistemic adjectives and adverbs occur more frequently than other kinds of hedges. As to the usage of modal auxiliary (which is an important sub-category of hedge), the speakers seem to prefer must, will and can (showing assertion and predictions) to should, would, could (implying tentative mood).This study is carried out from functional perspective. According to Halliday's Functional Grammar, language is what it is because it has to serve certain functions, namely ideational, interpersonal and textual functions. Former studies have told us the semantic, pragmatic and social functions of hedges, in this paper, the author will follow the steps of former researchers to further delve into metafunctions of hedges in political speeches. Hedge is used to perform ideational functions in that it increases or decreases fuzziness, thus changing the truth value of statements. The interpersonal functions of hedge lie in the fact that it is co-operation strategy, politeness strategy, self-protection strategy and credibility-raising strategy. Hedges are also very important in text: helping to construct macro-structure of the text, functioning as discourse markers and textual strategy.The study of hedges is a vast research area, so the research of hedges in this thesis is only one small aspect. The author hopes this study will help people become more aware of the strategies and functions of hedges in political speeches, so as to better interpret the implicature behind those hedges not only in political speeches but also in daily communications. Besides, through collecting the frequencies of different hedges and analyzing the metafunctions of hedges, the author hopes this could provide a new perspective for further study.