Hedges In Amencan Presidential Inaugural Addresses From The Perspective Of Politeness

As the most common and typical type of vague language, hedges serve to make the discourse more indirect, implicit, tactful and polite. Politeness theory accounts for the redressing of the offense to face posed by face-threatening acts, which has drawn extensive academia’s interest. As a sub-genre of public speaking, American presidential inaugural addresses (PIA) combine the characteristics of literary style, political rhetoric and legal style, and feature rhetorical vagueness and evasiveness. Although hedge has received considerable attention in linguistic field, it is noticed that research on function of hedge in specific context is relatively rare, especially on the connection between hedges and politeness. Within the framework of Brown and Levinson’s Politeness Strategy and Leech’s Politeness Principle and Prince et al.’s taxonomy of hedges, this research primarily attempts to explore how different types of hedges function as politeness strategy in PIA. The qualitative analysis of eighteen randomly selected samples of PIA shows that hedges are widely used in PIA of different historical periods and the use of hedges are of great significance to the realization of politeness strategies and politeness principle. First, four types of hedges are identified and their connection with politeness principle are exemplified. Second, it is found that:hedges as positive strategy minimize the distance between the addresser and the addressees, contributing to the attainment of the addresser’s political goals; hedges as negative strategy help to weaken the potentially face-threatening language and avoid imposing on the addressees, thus reduce the risk of arousing opposition from them and enhance the persuasiveness of the addresser’s claim; hedges as off-record strategy help the presidents to be more tactful and flexible in their speeches and evade the responsibility for face-threatening interpretation. This study is among the first to explore the connection between hedges and linguistic politeness in PIA. Politeness theory is proved to be applicable to hedging analysis. Therefore the study could lead to a further understanding of hedging and politeness strategies and enhance the awareness of linguistic politeness. Hopefully the research might be of some assistance to the appreciation of western political speeches.