Hedging As A Mitigation Mechanism In Political Interview

Abstract

The article discusses theoretical bases of mitigation, and hedging as one of its main strategies. The authors investigate approaches to classifying hedges, as well as their functions in political discourse. Being a social and linguistic phenomenon, hedging presupposes differences in regard to human gender. These differences can be easily observed in spoken form of communication, for example in debate, which is common for the genre of political interview. Existing studies on gender showed the prevalence of hedging devices in female speeches. Current study aimed at verifying or falsifying this theory with respect to political speeches. The analysed data were taken from the scripts of interviews with United States top-politicians. The data were classified based on the types of lexical hedges and gender of the speakers. In terms of structure, nine groups of hedging devices were singled out. These include fillers, introductory phrases, modal verbs, modal adverbs, indefinite pronouns, approximators, concessive conjunctions, conditional subordinators, and adverbs of frequency. The study revealed the dominant usage of hedges by women, although a visible shift towards gender uniformity was observed. The most numerous hedging devices for both genders are fillers and introductory phrases. The function of fillers is to “fill in” the pauses when speakers struggle to make her speech coherent and to express hesitation or uncertainty. Introductory phrases serve to mitigate the illocutionary force of the speech act.