Hedging in Kurdish with reference to English

Abstract EN

Hedging, a phenomenon prevalent in the study of language and linguistics is the point of investigation in the current work.

It is the violation of the Cooperative Principle of Quality proposed by Grice (1975), i.e.

the exact qualitative answer to a question does work well in all situations.

The phenomenon is to l>e neutral on the part of the speaker and it is unclear whether the speaker is with or against a notion through using some evasive expressions.

At the beginning, it was hypothesized that “Hedging” is a pragmatic trend associated with the situational context, i.e.

it is just the physical context that shows this phenomenon, and that it is employed for politeness purposes- the speaker, in order not to be tough with his idea that may threaten the face of the addressee, uses some tentative expressions that soothe the situation.

However, throughout the investigation of this topic and analysing utterances from Mr.

Bashar Mohammad Tahir's play “The One d to be fully true.

Hedging is a semantic phenomenon before being pragmatic, and it is not only used by the speaker when he wants to be polite in a specific situation, but also when he wants to be diplomatic and evasive, and the latter stands against politeness.