A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In American Presidents’ Campaign Speeches

Vagueness or fuzziness is one of the basic attributes of language. Vague languageexists in natural language in large amount. As a core member of vague language,hedges are widespread in daily communication and play an irreplaceable role incertain social situations. The usage of hedges will not affect people’s normalcommunication. On the contrary, it makes language expression more flexible anddecent. In daily life, people tend to use hedges in order to reach the specificcommunicative purpose.The linguistic research of hedges mainly focused on the semantic features in the1970s. With the development of pragmatics, the attention of hedges’ study turned toother research fields in the1980s, such as pragmatics, social linguistics, discourseanalysis, etc. In recent years, the analyses of hedges in various discourses have gotwidely attention from researchers, such as in academic publications, legal discourses,advertising discourses, etc. However, it is not difficult to find that the study of hedgesin political discourse such as American presidential campaign speeches is relativelyrare. American presidents’ campaign speeches are the extremely normal politicaldiscourses which are prepared for a long time. Every candidate attaches greatimportance to his campaign speech. As a special form of language communication,American presidents’ campaign speeches are used to declare candidates’ politicalopinion, advocate stance and win the majority support. So hedges are employed topass on specific information to the public, convince the audience and expresscandidates’ intention in American presidents’ campaign speeches. Therefore, thepragmatic study of hedges in American presidents’ campaign speeches is quitenecessary.On the basis of the previous studies of hedges, the study selects20pieces ofcampaign speeches in the U.S. presidential election as a corpus with the intention toexplore the pragmatic functions of hedges in campaign speeches under the guidance of the theoretical framework of Cooperative Principle, Conversational Implicature,Politeness Principle and Face Theory. The study adopts Prince et al.’s (1982)pragmatic classification of hedges, in which hedges can be divided into four types.The first type is adaptors, which can make certain modification on the originalmeaning based on the actual situation; the second type is rounders, which areemployed to offer a certain range to the original utterance; the third type is plausibilityshields, which are used to represent the speaker’s direct assumption or indicate thespeaker’s own attitude to the topic; the last type is attribution shields, which areapplied to express the speaker’s indirect attitude to the topic by quoting other people’sviews. The study aims to calculate the distribution and frequencies of different kindsof hedges in the campaign speeches based on the quantitative method and probe thespecific realization and pragmatic functions of various hedges qualitatively. Theresults of the study demonstrate that hedges widely exist in American presidentialcampaign speeches. Based on the major findings, the pragmatic functions are asfollows: raising persuasion and winning support; strengthening flexibility andobjectivity; avoiding responsibility and seeking protection; saving face and keepingpoliteness. Through the study, the author hopes to broaden the scope of interpretationof hedges in linguistics and provide a new research perspective for further linguisticstudies of hedges.