A Study Of Hedging In American President Obama’s Speeches

As a core of vague language, hedges are common in every language and play an important role in spoken and written communications."Hedge" as a linguistic concept was introduced by Lakoff in1972.This linguistic phenomenon understood by linguists differently. Lakoff asserts that "natural language sentences are neither true nor false nor sensical but true to a certain extent and false to a certain extent, true in certain respects and false in others". Therefore, from a functional viewpoint he explains hedges as "words or phrases whose job is to make things fuzzy". Following Lakoff, Brown and Levinson (1987) developed a different perspective basing their discussion on speech act theory and considered hedges as strategies for minimizing the threat to face. They argued that hedging can be explained by positive and negative "politeness strategies". At home, Professor Wu Tieping in Beijing Normal University was the first person who introduced fuzzy language into China. From then on, the research of it flourished. In fact, there are various kinds of words, phrases or sentence patterns that can be considered as hedges in languages. They have plenty of semantic features and pragmatic functions and can not be omitted and substituted.For a long time, the hedges research only stayed at the level of semantics and syntax. But it is just one side of the coin. With the development of pragmatics and discourse analysis, more and more scholars switched their studies from semantic perspective to pragmatic perspective. Many achievements had been made owing to the scholars’hard work. They found that hedges dramatically benefited linguistic expressiveness and increased communicative effects. Their proper use can make linguistic expressions more mild, polite, flexible and effective and improve the interpersonal relationship between discourse participants, thus helping achieve the purpose of communication. As a matter of fact, it is also true in political discourse. Under political circumstances, hedges dramatically enhance linguistic expressiveness and communicative effects. But the research of vagueness in political discourse is very little and the research of hedges in it is less. Little work has been done in the relationship between hedges and political discourse. To my knowledge, there were few researches carried out on hedges in political speeches; moreover, no one seems to have analyzed how politicians, i.e. presidential candidates and elected presidents, use hedges in their pre-election and post-election speeches separately. Thus, the purpose of this thesis was to explore hedges in political discourse, i.e. political speeches. Two types of political speeches were subjected to analysis:pre-election and postelection ones. The methods chosen for this research were critical discourse analysis and quantitative analysis. The research demonstrated that the frequency of hedges was higher in speeches delivered before the election than in speeches delivered after it. It also showed that pre-election speeches gave preference to hedging devices such as modal verbs, modal lexical verbs, special passive voice constructions, and introductory phrases whereas post-election speeches gave preference to hedging devices such as approximators and adjectival, adverbial and nominal modal phrases. Further studies on the use of hedging devices in pre-election political speeches must be conducted in order to prove or deny the existence of the relationship between the use of hedges and the success in election.The significance and novelty of this work is incorporated within the scope of the research. Based on a corpus of6political speeches with the focus of this research being solely on the speeches delivered by Obama, this paper discusses the importance of the frequency and realization of hedges in political speeches.This thesis is composed of five chapters. Chapter one is the general introduction of the study, presenting the research back ground, the purpose and significance of the thesis and the organization of the thesis. Chapter Two deals with hedges composed of two parts. This chapter reveals the previous researches on hedges at home and abroad as well as some related concepts. Chapter Three presents framework of the research which include the definition, the classification and the functions of hedges. The research methodology, research question and data selection that was used to carry out the research is also presented in the third chapter. The analysis and results compose the fourth chapter of this study. It presents the results of the research. It also provides the explanations of the results that we have got in the research. And conclusions compose the fifth chapter, which contains the major findings as well as the limitations of the study and suggestions for further research.