A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In2012American Presidential Debates

L. A Zadeh firstly put forward the concept of "fuzzy sets", which is used to describe vague concept in1965. It is a common phenomenon that hedges are used in the daily communication. In the early stages, many scholars study hedges from the perspective of semantics. With the development of pragmatics, linguists begin to change their research aspect from semantics to pragmatics. They do a lot of research about hedges in different kinds of discourse genres. Among those researches about hedges, most topics are related to advertising, scientific articles, news and so on. However, few of the research of hedges is about political speech, particularly American presidential debates.Therefore, the author takes2012American presidential debates as the corpus to study the pragmatic functions of hedges in political discourse. Prince and his colleagues’classification of hedge is used in this thesis. Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle are the theoretical frameworks of this thesis. The author does the quantity and quality analysis of hedges in2012American presidential debates. The software AntConc3.2.2w (Windows)2008is used in this thesis to calculate the frequency and distribution of hedges in2012American presidential debates. It can be seen from the calculation results that every type of hedges is used more frequently by Obama than Romney. It is very obvious that Obama uses much more plausibility shields than Romney. With the appropriate use of hedges, the candidates can strengthen the persuasion effect of their words, reflect their sincere attitude and help them get more votes.From analyzing the hedges within Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle, it is found that hedges are not the contents which speakers want to say but are notes indicating that the speakers observe Cooperative Principle. Speakers are not only aware of Cooperative Principle and try their best to show that they are observing it. At the same time, the hearers are expected to understand their words cooperatively. In such a way, the verbal communication can be carried on successfully. Despite some usages of hedges may seem to violate some of the maxims, they are observing Cooperative Principle actually if they aim to ensure the communication can be carried on successfully. Violating one maxim is for the purpose of observing another maxim. From the corpus analysis the author discovers that the use of hedges is mainly an indication of observing quality maxim, relevance maxim or quantity maxim. Because hedges make the topic more fuzzy, hedges are signs of violating manner maxim. At last, the author summarizes the following functions of hedges in this corpus:increasing the credibility, indicating the lack of specific information, shifting or avoiding responsibility, being self-protective and giving the right amount of information. With the use of hedges, the politicians can make their language seem cautious and polite so as to protect their good image in the heart of their people.