A Pragmatic Study Of Hedges In Fed Chair's Public Announcements From The Perspective Of Adaptation Theory

The highest officer in Federal Reserve System of the United States,commonly called the Fed Chair,is an influential and dominant figure in the field of finance as he or she gets to steer the largest economy in the world by manipulating monetary policy and banking regulations.The public announcements of the Fed Chair can command the world's attention because they can covey important messages of U.S Central Bank's policies and guide the direction of future global finance and economy.As a prime paradigm of financial speech,however,the public announcements of the Fed Chair invariably contain various kinds of hedges,leaving people a subtle sense of vagueness and uncertainty in the message delivered,and Fed's Chair's sophisticated use of hedges in public announcements almost perfected this manner of communication to an art form.Ever since the 1970 s,the study of hedges has gained traction globally in the academic world,and many scholars have studied hedges from the perspective of semantics and pragmatics and made certain contributions.However,the study of hedges using financial speeches as a research object is really rare.Taking Jef Verschuern's adaptation theory as research guidelines,with the help of Prince et al's classification principles,this paper explores the particular usage modes and patterns of certain hedges employed in the public announcements by four Fed Chairs to dissect the pragmatic functions and expression effects of hedges.50 public announcements are randomly selected from the official website and both quantitative and qualitative research methods are adopted to seek answers to 3 research questions:(1)What kinds of hedges are adopted in Fed Chair's public announcements?(2)What are the pragmatic functions intended by hedges in Fed Chair's public announcements?(3)How can the pragmatic functions of hedges be realized in Fed Chair's public announcements through adaptation theory?With the assistance of the concordance tool in AntConc software,the research results of quantitative analysis show that the total number of hedges accounts for 6.4% of the all the words in the self-built corpus.And the frequencies of hedges in the same number of public announcements made are very close,which demonstrates the coherence and consistency in the way hedges are used in Fed Chair's public announcements.Among all hedges,the number of adaptors ranks first,followed by plausibility shields and rounders which have roughly the same occurrence,while the number of attribution shields adopted is the lowest.After qualitative analysis,this thesis discovers that the 4 types of hedges have the intended pragmatic functions of protecting the speaker's professional “face”,softening the speaker's tone,enhancing the speech's credibility,avoiding the responsibility of the speaker and facilitating effective communication.Under the framework of adaptation theory,the reason that the abovementioned pragmatic functions can be realized is due to the fact that the Fed Chairs adapt to the time and space elements of the physical world,the elements of power and authority as well as cultures and conventions in the social world,the elements of the emotional needs of the speaker and that of the audience in the mental world,by hedging flexibly and appropriately.Through analysis of the use of hedges in Fed Chair's public announcements from a pragmatic perspective,this thesis aims at being able to expand the scope of application of adaptation theory and highlight the commonalities as well as features of financial speeches.At the same time,it aims to help the business English learners to read more accurately the attitudes and intent,guidelines and measures of the Fed Chair,to better understand the operation of the US economic and financial system,to improve the cognitive ability for macroeconomics for business English students as well as their ability to use hedges properly in making public English speeches.