A Pragmatic Study Of English Hedges In Political Speeches

As the significant member of vague language, hedges are widely employed in all kinds of languages and play their unique role in certain situations. The phenomena of hedges have stirred the interests of researchers since Lakoff defined hedges as"whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy"in 1972. At first, the notion of hedges used to be an object of study in logic and semantics. In the following 30 years, however, various approaches are applied in studying hedges, including from the perspectives of pragmatics, discourse analysis, stylistics, cross-cultural communicative strategies, and so forth. The study of hedges, consequently, becomes a very important issue in linguistic studies.From the survey of literature, it is not difficult to notice that the analyses of hedges in different discourses have been the key research subjects in recent years, such as, in business discourses, scientific articles, news, and advertisements. However, comparatively less effort has been carried out on the pragmatic exploration of hedges in political speeches.As a kind of political discourse, political speech has its own given purposes and motivations, which should be read between the lines. Furthermore, political speech is often demanded to possess a strong and convincing logic to transfer a sense of self-confidence and strength, thus leaving the deepest impression to the hearers or audience.First of all, this thesis selects 20 pieces of influential speeches made by famous American politicians as the corpus, and then presents a relatively reasonable definition of hedges by combining the taxonomies of Prince et al. (1982), Hyland (1998) and Channell (2000), and further probes into the pragmatic functions of hedges and the implications for better understanding of political speeches. Due to limited space and competence of the author, this thesis is confined to the pragmatic study of words and phrases based on such pragmatic theories as conversation implicature, cooperative principle, and politeness principle. As for the syntactic hedging strategies, this thesis shows little respect.The conclusion of the study suggests that the use of hedges is an important means of achieving appropriateness and accuracy in political speeches, thus promoting the political communication. The pragmatic functions of hedges in political speeches are as follows: providing the appropriate amount of information and avoiding giving detailed data; making the statements contingent and enhancing the credibility and persuasive effects; softening a stance or opinion and seeking self-protection; creating euphemistic effects and achieving politeness.The study of hedges is a vast research area. The research of hedges in this thesis only refers to the pragmatic perspective. The author hopes this study will help people become more aware of the functions of hedges in political speeches, so as to better interpret the implicature behind those hedges. Besides, through analysis of the frequencies of different hedges and discussion of their pragmatic functions, the author hopes this study could provide a new perspective for further study. Meanwhile, this thesis can be seen as a practical study of political language, which can be used by language learners to have a deeper understanding of English political language and pragmatics.