A Study Of Hedges In American Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Contextual Adaptation

Hedges have important pragmatic value in all kinds of discourses,and their proper use will promote the effects of verbal communication.The research on hedges is not confined to semantic and syntactic aspects but has been extended to the research fields of pragmatics,discourse analysis,translation studies and second language acquisition and researchers have made some achievements with regard to the study of hedges.However,the study of hedges in the American presidential debates has not received much attention.As such,this thesis explores the usage of hedges in 2008,2012 and 2016 American presidential debates.This thesis aims to calculate and make an analysis of the number of hedges in the full transcripts of the 2008,2012 and 2016 American presidential debates within the framework of adaptation theory.Furthermore,this thesis adopts the classification of hedges proposed by Prince et al.The number of hedges in the 2008,2012 and 2016 American presidential debates were calculated and analyzed with aim to investigate the usage of hedges.Moreover,this thesis analyzes the reason for the usage of hedges under the framework of adaptation theory.Based on the above mentioned research objectives,this thesis discusses the following three research questions,1.How do candidates adapt to the utterers' and interpreters' mental world by the employment of hedges? 2.How do candidates adapt to the social world by the employment of hedges?3.How do candidates adapt to the physical world by the employment of hedges?A small corpus was built,which collects and cleans full transcripts of the 2008,2012 and 2016 American presidential debates.Word tokens in the corpus totaled14,4161.The hedges in the corpus are annotated according to the classification of hedges proposed by Prince et al.and communication context was also taken into account.In this study,software of Ant Conc was used to count the occurrence of hedges in the corpus,and the analytical function of SPPS software was utilized to investigate the usage of four different types of hedges.The statistical results showed that the most frequently employed hedges are plausibility shields with significant differences in the use of the four types of hedges.Finally,the thesis discussed the reason why hedges are used by presidential candidates within the framework of adaptation theory,and how utterers use hedges to adapt to the mental world of utterers and interpreters,to the social world and physical world.