A Study Of Hedges In American President Donald Trump’s Speeches From The Perspective Of Rapport Management Theory

Hedging is an indispensable component of interpersonal and public communication,and the study of hedges has always been drawing the attention of scholars both at home and abroad.With the development of pragmatics,a lot of research achievements have been obtained from theoretical semantic research of hedges to pragmatic research of hedges in different styles.However,the studies of hedges in political speeches of current national leaders,mainly employ politeness principle(Leech,1983),politeness theory(Brown & Levinson,1987),and adaptation theory(Verschueren,1999).While the function of hedges in the selection of interpersonal harmony-disharmony orientation should be further explored.Rapport management theory(Spencer-Oatey,2000)serves as the theoretical framework of this study,and the corpus of the American president Trump’s speeches is constructed for the current research.According to Lakoff’s(1972)definition of hedges and Prince et al.’s(1982)classification of hedges,three research questions are proposed:(1)What are the frequencies and distributions of different kinds of hedges in DTPSC?(2)How are these hedges used to enhance or threaten the interpersonal relationships by means of managing face and sociality rights?(3)What are the factors that influence the hedges in DTPSC to achieve rapport management?With the help of corpus analysis tool AntConc and the scrutiny of context,this research annotates four types of hedges in the corpus and studies the frequency of each.The research findings are as follows:(1)the frequency of adaptors is the highest,while the frequency of attribution shields is the lowest.Rounders are used more frequently than plausibility shields.(2)For face management,Trump uses adaptors to give positive comments on the quality face of the audience’s ability and virtue,and aims to maintain harmonious interpersonal relationships.Many rounders are used to maintain Trump’s social status as the American president and the ownership of American citizen;For social rights management,attribution shields are frequently used to maintain the equity rights of the audience to avoid imposing self opinions on the audience,which might cause interpersonal tension.Plausibility shields are used to maintain participation,empathy and respect principle of association rights in order to shorten the social distance,maintaining interpersonal harmony.(3)Based on rapport orientations and the contextual variables(the identity face of American president,different themes of the speech,and the rights and obligations of Trump),Trump chooses different hedges to enhance or threaten interpersonal relations by means of enhancing or threatening the audience’s face and association rights,thereby having an influence on interpersonal relationships.In conclusion,based on the study of hedges in political speeches from the perspective of rapport management theory,it has both theoretical and practical implications for further studies.From the perspective of interpersonal pragmatics,this paper discusses the role of hedges in rapport management and it provides a new research path for the study of hedges.It is helpful to interpret the communicative intention of the speakers and identify the complicated hidden relationship.