Analysis Of Hedges In English Political Speeches From A Perspective Of Relevance-Adaptation Model

Most of researches on political speeches are conducted from the perspectives of rhetoric, cohesion or precision. In effect, apart from the studies above, skillful hedge-exploitation is also a rhetorical strategy frequently adopted by speech makers. In political speeches, hedges pop up frequently, which triggers the author’s curiosity about their contextual production, classification and interpretation.In previous studies, researchers find that a single theory, say. Cooperative Principle or Politeness Theory, fails to give a comprehensive explanation about the essence of communication. The author attempts to combine the relevance theory with the adaptation theory to explain the production and interpretation of hedges. For the speaker, hedges are the result of linguistic choice in accordance with the immediate context, so as to guide the audience to better interpret the utterance. For the listener, hedges will facilitate them to get the interpretation optimally relevant with less cognitive effort.The author collected18famous English political speeches covering all circles such as military affairs, economy and politics. First of all, all hedges in these speeches are marked and identified. The result indicates that, like rhetorical devices, hedges are pervasively adopted, with different frequencies for each category and different pragmatic functions. The author then gives a detailed interpretation about the formation of these hedges from the relevance-adaption theory and delves into the purpose of the speaker. The research is quite innovative in that the paper manages to analyze the data under the relevance-adaption model, and the analysis in turn proves the feasibility of the model for hedge interpretation. The research result of this hedge study will facilitate a better understanding of political speeches, and is likely to promote English language teaching and cross-cultural communication.