A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedges In The Presidential Debates Discourse

Linguistic hedges are important pragmatic markers in verbal communication. Asan indispensable member of the fuzzy language family, hedges have drawn a greatdeal of attention of scholars in various disciplines. Hedges exist in all kinds oflanguage genres and play an important part in our daily communication. In recentyears, more and more scholars have begun to analyze hedges in pragmatics and therehave emerged a lot of researches about hedges in various kinds of discourse genres.However, little research had been done on hedges of political discourse, especiallypresidential debates.Therefore, this study chooses the remarkable2012American presidential debatebetween Obama and Romney as the corpus to discuss the pragmatic functions ofhedges in political discourse, which not only promotes the development of fuzzylinguistics but also has practical meanings for the guidance of languagecommunication. Prince and his colleagues’ classification of hedges is employed toidentify which words or phrases belong to hedges in this corpus. In addition, thecombination of quantitative and qualitative analysis is used to investigate thedistribution and pragmatic functions of hedges in presidential debates within theframework of the Metafunction Theory.After careful analysis of the whole corpus, I come to the following conclusions.Although both candidates applied a large number of hedges during debates, muchmore differences between both candidates have been surfaced.(i) In the first debate,hedges are more frequently in Romney’s discourse than that in Obama’s discourse. Onthe contrary, during the last two debates, hedges appear more frequently in Obama’sdiscourse than that in Romney’s discourse.(ii) Two candidates have differentpreference to the use of hedges.(iii) Romney use more hedges under the topic of“jobs, deficit and health care” while Obama uses more hedges under the topic relatedwith social issues and foreign affairs, such as “equalities in the workplace, immigration and national security”. And three factors can account for thesedifferences, namely, tactic-driven, context-driven and position-driven.In addition, the ideational functions and interpersonal functions of hedges inpolitical debates have also been presented, such as the increase in fuzziness anddecrease in fuzziness. At the same time, I summarize six pragmatic functions ofhedges in political debates: to enhance the statement’s credibility, to attack opponents,to give relatively accurate information, to protect oneself, to show politeness, and tocreate a beautiful vision.