A comparative pragmatic analysis of hedging in male's and female's political discourse

Abstract EN

This study aims at investigating and analyzing the significance of ' hedging' in political discourse.

Janet Holmes (1984) has discussed this concept from a pragmatic perspective.

later, Urbanova (2003) proposed a model which this study has modified to be applicable to languages in general.

hedges are metadiscoursal devices that can be used to express uncertainty and to attenuate the illocutionary force of a given speech act.

context is the major factor that determines the type of the linguistic device in use.

there have been a number of researches dealing with the concept of ' hedging ' from different angles: political, scientific, pedagogical, sociological, and religious.

however, Arabic and namely Iraqi discourses have not been explored before at any of the aforementioned levels.

consequently, this research is based on an analysis of a corpus of (20) interviews conducted by the native English with the Iraqi male and female politicians in which the researcher makes several comparisons among these four groups so as to arrive at a better understanding of the difference in the orientations of the groups discussed in this study.

the results of the analysis have shown (i) there are different orientations of the four groups towards the use of ' hedging ', (ii) avoidance is the most commonly occurring strategy of hedging that characterizes spoken political discourse, and (iii) hedging is directly and widely affected by the recipient's design.