A Study Of Hedges In Obama’s Weekly Addresses From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

Vague language has widely existed in people’s daily communications. Hedge is a typical representative of vague language and has become a hot topic. Many linguistic scholars at home and abroad study hedges from the pragmatic and semantic aspects in different degrees. This study applies Verschueren’s core theory of pragmatic perspective- Adaptation Theory as the theoretical basis for the studying of hedges. According to the Adaptation Theory, language use is a process of continuous choice-making. Verschueren also proposes four angles for investigation. Taking one of the angle-contextual correlates of adaptability-as the research perspective, this study makes a detailed analysis of hedges to find out how hedges adapts to contextual correlates and the functions of hedges.This study selects US President Barack Obama’s 49 weekly addresses made in 2014 as research corpus. Firstly, this study applies a quantitative method to analyze the distribution and frequency of hedges used in 49 weekly addresses. Then this study applies a qualitative method to explore hedges from the aspects of adaptation to the mental world, the social world and the physical world in order to analyze the process of hedges adapting to these contextual factors, as well as to explore the functions of hedges in the political speech.The detailed analysis leads to following findings: 1) President Obama uses various hedges in his weekly addresses. Plausibility shields, attribution shields, adaptors and rounders take up 58.3%, 4.0%, 17.2% and 20.5% respectively in the total hedges. Hence, plausibility shields are used the most while attribution shields are used the least in Obama’s 2014 weekly addresses. And the proportion of adaptors and rounders are about the same in weekly addresses. The more use of plausibility shields shows that President Obama is willing to take responsibility for what he says. At the same time, using plausibility shields can help him improve his image and get more support from American citizens. The less use of attribution shields can establish his responsible image and rigorous attitude. 2) The use of hedges is an effective way to make President Obama’s weekly addresses successful because the functions of hedges have a great effect on his speech. According to the Adaptation Theory, President Obama adapts to not only his and the hearer’s mental world, but also to his political occupation and international relations with other countries. Besides he adapts to the space and time when he chooses different kinds of hedges in his weekly addresses. After the detailed study of hedges on Obama’s weekly addresses under adaptation theory, it can be found that the functions of hedges in political speeches are self-protection function, objectivity function, accuracy function and credibility function.This study is of certain significance for exploring the combination of hedges and the Adaptation Theory. At the same time, the author hopes that this study can provide some directions for future research on hedges and the Adaptation Theory.