Riassunto analitico
This paper reports on the findings of a study that aimed to identify the linguistic items which act as hedges in the speeches of the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, as well as to examine the pragmatic functions of these devices. Fifty political speeches of President Trump, randomly selected from the internet, were collected in an ad hoc corpus and then analyzed by means of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit, AntConc, developed by Laurence Anthony. This study was both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, frequencies and percentages of hedging devices were found and tabulated trough the wordlist generated by clicking on the Word List Tab across the top, namely, a list of all words within the corpus sorted by their frequency within the corpus itself in order to extract all hedging devices occurring in our ad hoc corpus of Trump’s political speeches. Qualitatively, the researchers presented an explanation of how and why such hedging devices are used. The adopted model for analysis was Salager-Meyer’s (1994). The study revealed that the most frequently used hedging devices in Trump’s speeches approximators of degree, quantity, frequency or time. The findings suggest that contrary to the expectations of the use of hedging as a strategy to evade responsibility or convey politeness, hedges in Trump’s speeches mostly occurred in a neutral and/or non-hedging manner, which means they had no impact on the utterance. The typical, expected pattern would have been hedges which diminish the force of the utterance or reduce the speaker’s commitment to the truth. In other words, the expected rhetorical pattern did not occur in Trump’s speeches. This study concludes that such controversial use of hedges in Trump’s political discourse might be ascribable to his background, thus, to his rhetoric as a businessman rather than a politician.
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Abstract
This paper reports on the findings of a study that aimed to identify the linguistic items which act as hedges in the speeches of the 45th President of the United States, Donald J. Trump, as well as to examine the pragmatic functions of these devices. Fifty political speeches of President Trump, randomly selected from the internet, were collected in an ad hoc corpus and then analyzed by means of a freeware corpus analysis toolkit, AntConc, developed by Laurence Anthony. This study was both quantitative and qualitative. Quantitatively, frequencies and percentages of hedging devices were found and tabulated trough the wordlist generated by clicking on the Word List Tab across the top, namely, a list of all words within the corpus sorted by their frequency within the corpus itself in order to extract all hedging devices occurring in our ad hoc corpus of Trump’s political speeches. Qualitatively, the researchers presented an explanation of how and why such hedging devices are used. The adopted model for analysis was Salager-Meyer’s (1994). The study revealed that the most frequently used hedging devices in Trump’s speeches approximators of degree, quantity, frequency or time. The findings suggest that contrary to the expectations of the use of hedging as a strategy to evade responsibility or convey politeness, hedges in Trump’s speeches mostly occurred in a neutral and/or non-hedging manner, which means they had no impact on the utterance. The typical, expected pattern would have been hedges which diminish the force of the utterance or reduce the speaker’s commitment to the truth. In other words, the expected rhetorical pattern did not occur in Trump’s speeches. This study concludes that such controversial use of hedges in Trump’s political discourse might be ascribable to his background, thus, to his rhetoric as a businessman rather than a politician.
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