Hedges In The Nobel Peace Prize Speeches:An Adaptation-Based Approach

Hedges realized as a linguistic strategy have aroused increasing interest among researchers in various fields at home and abroad, one of which is hedges in Nobel Prize speeches. However, rarely do scholars shift attention to hedges in the Nobel Peace Prize speeches. Therefore, based on Jef Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the author explores hedges in ten Nobel Peace Prize speeches from 2006 to 2015 with the help of Software WordSmith Tool 6.0, aiming to disclose the constrained contextual factors, the adaptation process, and pragmatic functions of hedges in the selected speeches. Through a quantitative analysis, a few findings are generated.First, lexical hedges are more frequently employed than non-lexical ones, reaching 67.18% and 32.82% respectively. Besides, hedges of the modal auxiliaries account for the highest, reaching 29.54%, while hedges of the interrogative questions make up the lowest, reaching 0.28%. This finding shows that the Nobel Peace Prize Laureates prefer to employ modal auxiliaries instead of interrogative questions to achieve specific communicative purposes in Nobel speeches.Meanwhile, three contextual factors, such as the mental world, the physical world and the social world, are taken into consideration by the Nobel Peace Laureates. Specifically speaking, the mental world concerns the speaker’s intention and the hearer’s expectation; the social world involves the social reality, and the Nobel Peace Prize’s convention; the physical world includes the temporal reference and spatial reference.Moreover, the author finds that hedges realized a linguistic strategy generate four pragmatic functions in the Nobel Peace Prize speech. They are creditability-increasing, persuasion-enhancing, self-protection-strengthening, and topic -shift-making.To sum up, through the hedge analysis from the perspective of Verschueren’s Adaptation Theory, the author hopes that the finding can not only provide a reference for speakers from different backgrounds to make better use of hedges to avoid misunderstanding between speakers and hearers, and to naturally achieve desired communicative effects but also broaden the scope of hedge study and polish speakers’ language skills in public speaking.