A Study Of Adaptability Of Hedges In American Presidents' Speeches In Chinese Universities

Vagueness is the natural property of language, and vague language is as important as precise language. As a special kind of vague language, hedges have recently aroused great interest. Hedges are communicative means of presenting a proposition as an opinion rather than a fact, often in terms of possibility and uncertainty. It can be used to modify a predicate or nominal phrases'membership or to modify the speaker's commitment to the truth value of the utterance. Researches have been done on hedges from the perspective of semantics, pragmatics and so on, while which can not well illustrate the generation of the hedges in communication. In his book Understanding Pragmatics in 1999, Verschueren systematically proposed taking a wide view of language and the Adaptation Theory. Taking a wide view emphasizes observing the use of language comprehensively by taking cognition, society and culture into considerations, and Adaptation Theory is the core of taking a wide view. This thesis attempts to research on hedges with Adaptation Theory to probe into the contextual factors it adapts to in the process of communication.This thesis makes a dedicate analysis on four speeches delivered by American President Reagan at Fudan University in 1984, American President Clinton at Peking University in 1998, American President Bush at Tsinghua University in 2002 and American President Obama at Fudan University in 2009, which all aim to strengthen the Sino-US relationship. This thesis gives a qualitative discussion of hedges in their speeches from the aspects of adaptation to speaker's mental world, hearer's mental world, social world and physical world.The analysis leads to following conclusions: 1) hedges are widely used in the four American presidents'speeches. The frequency (n/1000 words) of hedges in four speeches can be respectively described as: 44.4, 39.2, 36.2 and 37.5 per 1000 words in Reagan, Clinton, Bush and Obama's speeches. The lexical hedges take up the most coverage respectively up to 87.1%, 73%, 73.5% and 81.4%,in which modal auxiliaries and approximators are most applied; 2) the reasons for using hedges are due to the same type as diplomatic speech which acquires the objectivity and accuracy on some serious and important issues so as to achieve publicizing and persuading effect, the identity of American president, the aim of avoiding spoiling Sino-US relationship on some sensitive issues, the same audience as intellectuals with high linguistic ability and with enough knowledge about the international situation, intelletuals'good ability of understanding the hedges, intellectual's tolerance about hedges; 3) the reason for high frequency of modal auxiliaries and approximator is due to their property of uncertainty and possibility, flexibility; 4) four presidents in their speeches constantly make choices of expressions to adapt to their intention of achieving self-protection, objectivity, accuracy and adapt to achieving aim of interaction with hearers, and adapt to the hearer's mental world, and adapt to the social world and physical world of time and space.