A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In US Daily Press Briefing

In comparison with the presence of the accurate representation, hedging expressions are generally employed to be the opposite devices in conveying information. Since Lakoff introduced this concept at the first beginning, a number of researches have been conducted as a result of its exceptional effect on the information delivery. The relevant research objects involve the discourse from various fields including news, advertisements, interviews or the television programs, political debates, government reports, public speeches, court trials and literature works, etc.The present study randomly picks out 20 pieces of daily briefing transcripts as the research target, aiming to figure out the situation of hedges application in diplomatic language and their particular effect and functions from the perspective of pragmatics. The present research addresses four questions:(1) What is the general situation of hedges employed in the US daily press briefing? (2) What are the frequencies of various lexical realizations of each type of hedges in daily press briefing? (3) How do hedges perform in the daily press briefing in combination with Cooperative Principle? (4)What are the pragmatic functions hedges possess in the diplomatic language? Both quantitative and qualitative approaches are employed to elicit the general conclusions to each question which is presented in the final part of this paper.The detailed analysis on the application situation of hedges in daily briefings demonstrates the overall distribution of all the four categories of hedges in which it can be easily discovered that the spokesman inclines to employ shields especially the plausibility shields more frequently than approximators. The following several lexical forms like modal auxiliaries, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and quantifiers occur in the research material more often than others. In addition, the lexical realizations of each category, which can be treated as the new and significant findings in the present research on hedges, are displayed in the thesis in length as well. As regards the employment of hedges with Cooperative Principle, the research results indicate that the violation of these maxims better serves to derive the implied intentions of the speaker and better accounts for the specific pragmatic functions of hedges.The significance of the present study is to obtain a deeper acquaintance with the application of hedges of diplomatic language in press conference and on the other hand to provide a better insight into the comprehension of the spokesman's tact confronted with tricky and sensitive issues.