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Speakers usually apply the strategy of fuzziness to perform their skills and competence. It is necessary for the purpose of a successful speech. We can’t be judgmental about whether the fuzziness in language is good or bad. Instead, hedges can be used as a linguistic strategy to achieve the goal and effects of communication. Here political addresses delivered by President Obama are as examples to epitomize the skills of hedges using.
1.2 Significance
The thesis aims to clarify what belongs to the family of hedges. Among perse definitions, the author tends to identify with the cohesion of that hedges are those that make things fuzzier or less fuzzy by Lakeoff and hedges are an unclear and vague expression deliberately used which origins from Merriam-Webster Dictionary. The cohesion can best explain the linguistic strategy.
The analysis is carried out from the pragmatic perspective. Under a certain context, appropriate application of hedges is a powerful and effective tool for the speakers to achieve their communicative goals. Particularly under political context, the thesis hopes to help statesmen and diplomatists promote the acceptability and credibility, and achieve the purpose of self-protection and politeness as well. In the field of English teaching and learning, the thesis hopes to help Chinese students to understand and use fuzziness and hedges in political speeches better.
1.3 Organization
The thesis consists of four chapters and a conclusion. Chapter 2 lists four parts: a review of the definition and classification of the hedges, in which the previous researches on hedges at home and abroad are given, Characteristics of Political Speech, speech styles of President Obama and an introduction of pragmatic principles. Chapter 3 introduces methodology and data collection. Chapter 4 focuses on the pragmatic analysis of hedges in Obama’s speeches, covering two parts: frequency and proportion of hedges in the corpus and pragmatic analysis of hedges in Obama’s speeches. In the end, the conclusion includes a summary to the major results of the research, points out the limitations and extends some suggestions for further researches.
2 Literature Review
2.1 Definition and classification of hedges
2.1.1 The Definition of Hedges
Here several main kinds of definitions of hedges are listed out. American transformative semanticist George Lakoff is the first person to study hedges from semantic perspective. He defines hedges as follows:
“For me, some of the most questions are raised by the study of words whose meaning implicitly involves fuzziness-words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy. I will refer to such words as ‘hedges’ ” (Lakeoff, 1972:234).
“Lakeoff describes hedges in terms of logic and truth values, claiming that they allow for degrees of nonsense as well as degrees of truth in the logical structure” (Lakeoff, 1972: 233). He believes that natural language is vague more or less, and the boundary can’t be absolutely clear.
Brown and Levinson(1987:145) defined hedges as “a particle, word or phrase that modifies the degree of a membership of a predicate or a noun phrase in a set; it says of what membership that it is particle or true only in some respects , or that it is more true and complete than perhaps might be expected”.
From the sociolinguistic perspective, Hyland (1998:1) explains hedges as “words that express epistemic modality”. In his opinion, speaker’s degree of vagueness about a proposition and his/her attitudes towards the addressees jointly determined the speaker’s literal meaning.
At home, Zhang Qiao (1998: 70) defined hedges as “a word (or words) that brings in a fuzzy reading, or modifies fuzziness to an extent”. Li Qianju (2007: 181) defined hedges as “words that modify a fuzzy word and make words less fuzzy, or those phrases that make a statement fuzzier or less fuzzy.”来~自^751论+文.网www.751com.cn/