Abstract
Hedging is a communicative strategy and a form of pragmatic competence which plays a central role in delivering the intended message of the speaker. Commonly observed in two-way conversations, hedges as hedging devices are also present in monologues. This study investigates the most common hedges used in popular monologues TED Talks as well as observes the various communicative strategies they denote. 130 transcripts of the talks, taped from 2002-2019 taken from the official website of TED (ted.com), are collected to build a corpus of 337,302 tokens. Through corpus-based analysis using concordance software AntConc 3.5.0, 48 most common hedges are inserted for frequency search. The search hits show that the most frequently-used hedges in the corpus are ‘just,’ ‘could,’ ‘you know,’ ‘actually,’ ‘I think,’ and ‘kind of’ with the numbers of occurrence 1107, 554, 541, 530, 390, and 309 respectively. From the analyses of the functions of the most frequent hedges, it can be concluded that each of the hedges serves distinctive pragmatic strategy which contributes in the communicative processes of the talks.
Highlights
TED Talks belong to TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an organization curated by Sapling Foundation, a nonprofit established by publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson
The study is based on the exploration of a corpus which consists of 130 official transcripts of TED Talks
The corpus-based pragmatic study explores the pragmatic functions of hedges as communicative strategies and investigates how the linguistic device subsists in the corpus of TED Talks transcripts
Summary
TED Talks belong to TED (Technology, Entertainment, Design), an organization curated by Sapling Foundation, a nonprofit established by publishing entrepreneur Chris Anderson. Under the slogan "ideas worth spreading" TED was founded in JEELS (Journal of English Education and Linsguistics Studies, 8(2), 29-50. 1984 as a live conference to disseminate innovative ideas in front of live audiences. Once an elite conference accessible only to limited amount of viewers who had to pay a certain amount of money, TED Talks have been posted online to reach a broader audience since 2006. TED Talks speakers come from various background both academic and non-academic. Many of them are scientists, artists, authors, entrepreneurs, and social innovators. They come from different countries and speak a significant number of English varieties. Among the notable speakers are Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Tesla’s Elon Musk, and fashion designer Isaac Mizrahi
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