A Study Of Hedges In Political Speeches From The Perspective Of Pragmatic Functions

Hedges, as a special kind of vague language, play an indispensable role. Accordingto the American linguist George Lakoff, hedges refer to “words whose job is to makethings fuzzier”. As a matter of fact, hedges involve not only some words, but alsosome phrases, structures and even clauses. All of the above terms are generally calledhedges. Later on, more and more scholars from both China and abroad dedicatedthemselves to the new linguistic field—hedges, and achieved much progress in thisresearch field. In the process of collecting the materials of hedges, the author hasfound that hedges are frequently used in daily discourses, and especially employedrepeatedly in some certain situations by some certain professions. Thus the frequentuse of hedges in English political speeches attracts the author’s attention. As the mosttypical form of English political speeches, American presidential inaugural addressesare treated as the context of the study on hedges by the author. The author makes anendeavor to select language materials from five American presidential inauguraladdresses, studying the concrete functions of hedges from the perspective ofpragmatics.This thesis gives an introduction of the previous study on hedges from the linguistsin China and abroad, and then summarizes the definitions and classifications ofdifferent linguists, as well as the fundamental functions of hedges. And then theauthor presents the theoretical framework—the Politeness Principle andFace-threatening Act Theory (FTA Theory). The author makes an analysis on thelanguage data, employing both the methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis. Inthe quantitative analysis, the author adopts Hyland’s categorization of hedges,classifying hedges into different types according to their parts of speech anddistinctive functions. Based on the data from the corpus, frequency of different kindsof hedges is accounted. It can be found that hedges are frequently employed by American presidents in the presidential inaugural addresses and the non-lexicalhedges are applied much more frequently than the lexical hedges. The authordiscovers that the depersonalization is used the most frequently when further studyingthe non-lexical hedges. In the qualitative analysis, the Politeness Principle and FTAtheory are treated as the theoretical framework. By selecting concrete materials andconsidering the specific context, the author attempts to analyze the four mainpragmatic functions of hedges: enhancing the expressivity of language, displayingthreat, expressing authority and politeness, and creating a beautiful vision. Throughthe analysis of the using method, language characteristics and the pragmatic functionson hedges, this thesis will assist more English learners to understand the employmentand functions of hedges clearly, and to comprehend the pragmatic functions of hedgesin the political speeches better. And it also can contribute to the English learners’handling English, communicative abilities, and formal writing skills. Finally, theauthor indicates the limitations of the study and makes some constructive suggestionsfor the further study.