An Analysis Of Hedges In The 2008 American Presidential Debates From The Perspective Of Cooperative Principle

As an important member of the fuzzy language family, hedge is always a hot research subject which the linguists are interested in. Hedges exist in all kinds of language styles and play an important part in our daily communication. After reading the related literature, we find that with the development of the pragmatics and the discourse analysis more and more scholars start to study hedges in pragmatics, not only limited to semantics. Gradually, there emerges a lot of research about hedges in many discourse genres. However, the author discovers there is little research about hedges in political discourse.For this reason, this paper chooses the remarkable American presidential debates in 2008(total 42,809 words) as the corpus to discuss the usage of hedges in political discourse with the quantitative and qualitative methods. The author adopts Prince and his colleagues'categorization which classifies hedges into adaptors, rounders, plausibility shields and attribution shields and determines which words or phrases belong to hedges in this corpus. The AntConc3.2 .2w (Windows) software is used to retrieve the frequency of hedges in the presidential debates. And then the comparison of the hedges used by Obama and McCain is followed. Next Grice's Cooperative Principle in the Conversational Implicature is used to analyze the hedges in the presidential debates and reveal their pragmatic functions.The research results show that every type of hedges is used more frequently by Obama than McCain. It is very obvious that Obama uses much more plausibility shields than McCain. We can say that to a certain extent the appropriate use of hedges strengthens Obama's persuasiveness and help him win the recognition of most people. From analyzing the hedges within Cooperative Principle, it is found that hedges are not the contents which speakers want to say but are notes indicating that the speakers observe Cooperative Principle. Speakers are not only aware of Cooperative Principle and try their best to show that they are observing it. At the same time, the hearers are expected to understand their words cooperatively. In such a way, the verbal communication can be carried on successfully. Despite some usages of hedges may seem to violate some of the maxims, they are observing Cooperative Principle actually if they aim to ensure the communication can be carried on successfully. Violating one maxim is for the purpose of observing another maxim. From the corpus analysis the author discovers that the use of hedges is mainly an indication of observing quality maxim, relevance maxim or quantity maxim. Because hedges make the topic more fuzzy, hedges are signs of violating manner maxim. At last, based on the analysis of the hedges within Cooperative Principles framework, the author summarize the following functions of hedges in this corpus: proving right amount of information; withholding information deliberately; indicating the lack of specific information; self-protection; avoiding or shifting responsibility. With the use of hedges, the politicians can make their language seem cautious and polite so as to protect their good image in the heart of their people.