Hedging in Political Discourse: The Case of Trump's Speeches

This study examines the use and functions of hedging devices in political discourse by analysing two of the now former American President Donald Trump's speeches. The study adopts Salager-Meyer's (1997) framework to analyse the use of hedging devices and Rabab'ah's and Abu Rumman's (2015) framework to assign functions to hedges. The findings reveal that approximators and modal auxiliary verbs were the most frequently used hedging devices in the two speeches and that there is a noticeably frequent use of the modal auxiliary verbs will and must, an indication of power. In addition, the findings show that Trump used hedging devices almost equally between the two speeches although there is a one-year gap between the speeches selected1. As for the functions, the analysis shows that, in addition to the five functions in Rabab'ah and Abu Rumman (2015), there emerged three additional functions; namely, emphasis, power and multi-functional hedges. Most hedges were generally used to mitigate language while some were used to indicate necessity and authority.