Abstract
Hedges and boosters are crucial metadiscourse markers to soften and strengthen the proposition. Presidential candidates also rely on hedges and boosters to draw the publics' intentions. This study aims to explore the use of hedges and boosters in Trump's and Clinton's utterances in the US presidential debates in 2016. Accordingly, discourse analysis was adopted in this present study to find out the realization of types and functions of hedges and boosters as well as the differences and similarities of the occurrences of hedges and boosters between those two candidates based on the taxonomies of Salager-Meyer (1997), Demir (2017), Rabab'ah and Rumam (2015) and Hyland (2005). The strategy was elaborated into six sub-research questions to find out types, functions, differences, and similarities of hedges and boosters. The data were obtained from the transcript of the debates. The findings reveal that the seven types of hedges and six types of boosters were discovered in the utterances of Trump and Clinton. Associated with the functions of hedges and boosters, it shows that Trump and Clinton tend to use hedging devices to mitigate their claims by showing some kind of uncertainty. Boosters also applied to put emphasis on the value of the truth of their statements. It was discovered that Trump used more boosters and Clinton used more hedging devices as well.
Highlights
Politics is an effective way to reach goals
There are six themes of the data presented based on the research questions, types of hedges, types of boosters, functions of hedges, functions of boosters, the similarities, and the differences of hedges and boosters
The findings are in line with Taweel (2011); Jalilifar and Alavi (2011); Laurinaitytė (2011); Al- Rashady (2012); Rabab'ah and Rumman (2015); Idowu, Olubunmi, and Owuye (2019); Taweel (2011) that hedges play significant roles in political discourse
Summary
Politics is an effective way to reach goals. It is used to convince and make changes to people's attention (Janoschka, 2010) and subsequently their behavior. In a presidential debate, a presidential debate is a public debate held during a general election campaign. The candidates expose their political opinions and public policy proposals, and criticism to potential voters (Kettle, 2010). Presidential candidates are supposed to verbalize their ideological stances, as well as socio-economic strategy plans in a way that looks persuasive to voters to defeat their political opponents and gain a significant number of votes. A whole rhetorical strategy spectrum from two subcategories of metadiscourse markers, hedges, and boosters may be applied by the candidates
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