Hedges In Political Discourse

As a core of vague language, hedges are common in every language and play an important role in spoken and written communications.The phenomena of hedges aroused the interest of researchers in 1970s when G. Lakoff defined"hedge"as"whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy"in 1972. After that, hedge study was shifted from semantic perspective to pragmatic perspective. 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. Based on the previous studies, from the pragmatic perspective, this thesis carries on a comprehensive study on the application of hedges in political discourse and their pragmatic functions by using Conversation Implicature, Cooperative Principle, Politeness Principle, and FTA theory. The qualitative and descriptive analysis research methodologies are employed in the paper.First, the thesis gives a general introduction to hedges and points out the research problem, methodologies, objective and significance of the study. Then, the paper summarizes the research of hedges made by famous linguists and lists the principles in pragmatics that are useful in the research. On the basis, the paper pays attention to the pragmatic functions in political discourse and gets important significance. Finally, through the principles in pragmatics, it gives the pragmatic analysis of hedges in political discourse and concludes that hedges play important role in political discourse. To politicians, making correct and full use of hedges can promote the acceptability and achieve the self-protections and politeness. It is also of great benefit to make correct decisions in the changeable international situation. The results of the paper can also be applied to English learning and teaching.