A Study Of Adaptability Of Hedges In The Presidential Debate Between Obama And Romney

Hedge is an universal language phenomenon which can amend the contents ofdiscourse according to the true extent or scope, and which can also indicate that thespeaker has a direct and subjective measure of discourse content or has an indirectevaluation of the content based on the objective evidences. In recent years, hedges areapplied in more and more fields, one of the most prominent one is the application ofpoliticians. They use hedges to achieve a particular communicative purpose, such as,during the U.S. Presidential debates, Obama and Romney applied hedges to get thefinal support of Americans. This study attempts to analyze the adaptative functions ofhedges used by Obama and Romney in2012U.S. Presidential debates, which not onlypromotes the development of fuzzy linguistics but also has practical meanings for theguidance of language communication.This thesis uses the three presidential television debates as corpus and attemptsto analyze how Obama and Romney adopt various hedges to adapt to the speakers andhearers’ mental world, social world and physical world on the basis of AdaptationTheory. In addition, the combination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is used toinvestigate the distribution and adaptative functions of different categories of hedgesin three presidential debates.This study finds out that there are more similarities than differences in the use ofhedges between Obama and Romney in these three presidential debates. Both of themuse plausibility shields to protect themselves, use attribution shields to keep theirexpressions objective and use approximators to keep their expressions accurate. Thestudy also finds some little differences in the number of applications of hedges thatObama uses more hedges than Romney, which has no significance for further study.Through the use of hedges, their speech will be more flexible, reflect a more seriousattitude and help establishing a responsible leader image. This study providesimportant implication for helping English readers have a better understanding of political speech, and the author hopes that the research results can be applied toEnglish teaching and help English teachers training the students to have the ability toanalyze the political speech.