A Pragmatic Study of Hedges in American Presidential Debates开题报告

1. 研究目的与意义

Fuzzy phenomenon exists objectively and widely in all aspects of human life. People have paid close attention to the fuzzy phenomenon for a long time, and there are many studies on fuzzy language. However, the special research on hedges has been carried out only in recent two or three decades. Hedges are an important pragmatic marker in human communication, which promote language communication. As the core member of fuzzy language, hedges play an important role in people''s daily communication. Since Zadeh first put forward the concept of fuzzy set (Zadeh, 1965), this concept has attracted the attention of many linguists and scholars. Then, Lakoff proposed the definition of hedges (Lakoff, 1972). Afterwards, many studies have given the classification and concept of hedges, and discussed the usage of hedges from many different angles. However, there are few studies on hedges in political dialogue documents, especially in presidential election debates in the United States. Presidential candidate debate is a necessary and crucial process in American presidential election events. As a penetrating and logical political text, the study of hedges in presidential debates will not only help people understand the US presidential elections, but also further understand other types of political documents.

2. 研究内容和预期目标

in the presidential debate, candidates inevitably use a large amount of hedges which is considered an effective discourse strategy. based on price et al ’s classification of hedges , the paper selects the discourse of election debates in 2008, 2012 and 2016 as the research text, establish corpora of hedges , and analyze the data to figure out the pragmatic functions of hedges in the presidential debates.

outline:

3. 国内外研究现状

with the popularity of the media, more and more people are focusing on american presidential elections. in this process, compared with the election results, people begin to pay more attention to the election process. many scholars study the wording in election debates, among which hedge plays an important role.

professor zadeh first put forward the concept of fuzzy set for the first time in his famous paper fuzzy set. zadeh believes that not everything that exists in the physical world has strict standards, because some concepts cannot be classified by mathematical calculation, for example, 'beautiful woman' and 'tall man' are difficult to categorize (zadeh, 1965).however, zadeh''s research on fuzzy sets is limited to semantic research to a large extent. based on the study of zadeh, lakoff mentions the term 'hedges' for the first time, which is defined as 'words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy' (lakoff, 1972). zadeh and lakoff propose the concept of hedges from the semantic point of view. different from the two scholars, prince, fraderamp;bosk divides hedges into two categories from a pragmatic angle -- approximators and shields, by exploring the dialogue between doctors and patients (prince, fraderamp;bosk, 1982). in the course of analyzing the doctor-patient discourse, prince found that precise data are usually used to describe the patient''s weight, blood pressure, and so on. while in some cases, the physician is very difficult to provide a precise number when referring to the subjects, but only to provide a rough range by using words such as, about, over, bound, roughly, something. thus it can be seen that communicators often use approximators when they are uncertain about something.

wu [吴铁平] is the first scholar who introduce the concept of hedges in china through his paper in 1979 (hyland, 1998). he believes that people often use hedges in daily dialogue, although fuzzy language is not accurate, but has a special function(wu, 1979). he[何自然] (1990)agrees with the division of hedges by prince et al., and holds that hedges including modal verbs that represent possibility can reflect the speaker''s attitude to a certain extent. lyons, on the other hand, holds different view that all modal verbs imply the author''s views and attitudes (lyons, 1977). therefore, there are also some linguists, such as su [苏远连] （2002）, jiang [蒋婷]（2006）, and jiang [蒋跃]（2007）, pointing out that all the modal verbs can be classified as shields. in general, many scholars have focused on the pragmatic study of hedges. in xu’s view[徐畅贤] (2006 ), the pragmatic function of hedges can be summarized as making language expression more euphemistic, improving the flexibility and appropriateness of language, ensuring comprehensiveness, protecting speakers, and so on.

4. 计划与进度安排

This paper is generally divided into six parts. The first part gives a brief introduction, telling the research backgrounds, the significance of the essay, which also includes the summary of the previous studies of hedges in presidential debates both at home and abroad. The second part is to expound the main theories employed in the essay- Grice’s Cooperative Principle and Prince et al’s Model. The third part is to collect data by and build corpora by Antconc with comparison. Then, it focuses on the pragmatic analysis of hedges in American presidential debates. According to Prince et al’s Model, articles about hedges will be analyzed in two aspects – shields and approximators. To be specific, the fourth part involves data result, explaining pragmatic functions of plausibility shields and attribution shields. The fifth part explains pragmatic functions of adaptors and rounder with presenting data. Finally, the conclusion part consists of contributions and limitations of the essay. It hopes to assist readers in seeing clearly the pragmatic functions of hedges in American presidential debates.

5. 参考文献

amalia, m., gusthini, m., amp;sobarna, c. (2018). a pragmatic study of speech as an instrument of power: analysis of the 2016 usa presidential debate. studies in english language and education, 5(1), 97-113.

a, na. (2014). a study of pragmatic functions of hedges in 2012 american presidential debates. inner mongolia university, inner mongolia.

fahad, a. (2012). determining the role of hedging devices in the political discourse of two american presidential debates in 2008, tesol journal, ( 7) , 30-42．