A Corpus-based Analysis Of Hedges In American Presidential Inaugural Addresses

Vagueness pervades in human thinking and natural language. In recent years research on hedges has been drawing greater and greater attention. This thesis, based on the corpus of 61 pieces of American presidential inaugural addresses (PIA), aims to approach hedges from a pragmatic perspective both quantitatively and qualitatively. Special emphasis is placed on the pragmatic functions and realization of hedges in the specific genre of presidential inaugural addresses. For this purpose computer software AntConc3.2.0 is applied with the aid of manual work to work out the distribution and frequencies of different types of hedges and to summarize their pragmatic functions and realization in the corpus. The study shows that hedges abound in PIA. The effectiveness of PIA is greatly affected by the variety of pragmatic functions and strategies employed in many aspects. The most remarkable functions include self-protection, politeness and self-image maintenance, raising reliability and shifting responsibility. Moreover, among all the hedges, plausibility shields play a vital role and account for the most part in PIA with its highlighted member of modal verbs.