This study compares the frequency and types of hedging devices used in the presidential debate of 2020 between Donald Trump and Joe Biden. Many studies have investigated hedging in political discourse, which has been shown to function as a rhetorical strategy in contexts such as political press interviews and political debates. The current study applied corpus linguistic methodology by creating a corpus of transcripts of the two presidential debates of 2020. To establish what types of hedges were used, a theoretical framework from Fraser (2010a) was used to classify the hedges into two main categories: Propositional hedges and Illocutionary hedges. A manual search showed that hedges did occur in the presidential debate and were used by both candidates to some extent. Based on the results, it could be argued that the hedging appearing in the debates was mainly used to create vagueness, express caution, evade taking responsibility for the validity of a statement, and show a lack of commitment to an utterance. The results further showed that Trump used hedges more frequently than Biden did. However, the scope of this study is not suited to make any reliable assumptions regarding whether frequent use of hedging is negative or positive.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:du-39650 |
| Date | January 2022 |
| Creators | Lundberg, Elsa |
| Publisher | Högskolan Dalarna, Institutionen för språk, litteratur och lärande |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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