A Corpus-Based Pragmatic Study On Hedges In 2016 American Presidential Debates

In 1972,G.Lakoff initially proposed the term “hedges”,which states that hedges are “words that make things fuzzy.” Since then,hedges have been universally explored from the perspective of rhetoric,semantics and pragmatics by numerous scholars.Specifically,hedges are widely studied in various types of discourses including news reports,business letters,legal documents and program interviews.But there are only a few researches studying on political discourse,especially the presidential debates which can not be overlooked.This study selected 2016 American presidential debates between Trump and Hillary as the corpus and adopted Prince's classification on hedges.Under the guideline of Cooperative Principle and Politeness Principle,this study used Antconc 3.2.1 to deal with three research questions: 1)What are the features of semantic prosody of typical hedges that used in the 2016 American presidential debates based on Sinclair's theory? 2)How do these hedges help Trump and Hillary realize their speaking intentions based on pragmatic principles? 3)What pragmatic functions of hedges can be evidenced in2016 American presidential debates?The results show that: 1)In 2016 American presidential debates,there are totally 4124 hedges covering 183 types,among which plausibility shields are used most frequently with the occurrence of1514 times and 37 types.Compared with plausibility shields,attribution shields are the least with the appearance of 474 times and 24 types.Adaptors are used more frequently than rounders.The former occurs 1434 times and covers 85 types while the latter 702 times and 37 types.In the meanwhile,the typical hedges “about” and “will” show neutral semantic prosody with the appearance of 252 times and230 times respectively.Additionally,proportion of positive semantic prosody of “will” accounts for46%.“Very” appears 219 times and presents positive semantic prosody.2)Both of the two candidates realize pragmatic principles while using hedges.They intentionally violate some maxims of Cooperative Principle and observe tact maxim,approbation maxim and agreement maxim of Politeness Principle in the conversation,which aims to achieve successful communication and win the campaign.3)Hedges used in 2016 American presidential debates mainly present four kinds of pragmatic functions: giving the right amount of information,deliberately withholding information,achieving politeness and self-protection.The study enriches the research field of hedges,provides new studying perspective and combinessemantics and pragmatics,which has some guidance and insights for relative studies.What is more,it is by analyzing plenty of examples that this thesis deeply discusses how the two candidates tactfully avoid taking unnecessary responsibility,skillfully protect themselves and realize their conversational intentions when facing with sensitive and controversial questions.Last but not the least,this study also helps us know much more about the nature of presidential debates to some extent.