The influence of social variables on the use of hedging in Mosuli Arabic

Abstract EN

Hedging is one of the skills that human beings need in their everyday life for successful communication.

Hyland, (1998: 1) defines hedging as “any linguistic means used to indicate either a lack of complete commitment to the truth value of an accompanying proposition, or a desire not to express that commitment categorically”.

according to Schröder and Zimmer, hedging is used to refer to “the strategies of using linguistic means as hedges in a certain context for specific communicative purposes, such as politeness, vagueness, mitigation” (1997: 249).

in Arabic language, some researches conduct this phenomenon.

Andrusenko (2015) translates the English categories proposed by Hyland (2005) into Arabic language, Abbas' 2011 gives statistics of the use of hedges in Arabic and English in academic writing, al-Rassam (2004) identifies and classifies the linguistic devices and strategies used to express hedging in Arabic.

this study focuses on the influence of social variables such as topic, age and gender on the use of hedging in everyday interactions in Mosuli Arabic (MA henceforth).

The data consist of 300 authentic hedged utterances used by ma speakers of different ages in everyday interaction.

the collected data consist of 150 utterances by males and 150 by females on different daily topics.

according to Verschueren, “using language must consist of continuous making of linguistic choices” (2000, p.

55).

as a model, this study adopts the adaptation theory proposed by Verschueren in which four angles of investigation are used to conduct any linguistic phenomenon.

the study reveals typical hedging expressions (forms) that are used in all topics by speakers of all age groups and of both genders.

nine types of topics of hedging are recognized in the corpus of this study.

the study shows that hedging is a gender sensitive phenomenon as far as vocabulary, types, syntactic and pragmatic forms and topics are concerned.

additionally, it proves that there are similarities as well as differences between males and females in using hedging strategy.

it proves that young-children, mid-age children and old adults use hedging less than other life stages.