Abstract
Language as a social phenomenon is affected by different factors such as age, gender, social status, culture, etc. Hedge is also considered as a part of language and a pragmatic phenomenon, seeming to be under the influence of these factors. This paper aims at investigating the effect of gender (female and male) and style (informal and formal) on the use of hedging by Persian speakers which hasn’t been considered yet. To this ends, in informal style, 8 Persian films (2012-2018) lasting for 12 hours and 54 minutes, 7 telephone conversations, each lasted for 20 minutes among genders, and some recorded daily conversations in different contexts were selected randomly. In formal style, 10 MA theses from different majors written by 5 Persian male and 5 female students were examined based on hedge taxonomies by Salager-Meyer (1997), Clemen (1996), Skelton (1988), and Jalilifar (2006). In this study, a new hedging category was added to their taxonomies. Running Chi-square analyses, it was found that, firstly, there was no significant difference between genders considering the use of hedges and no difference in the number of hedges used by them. Secondly, the hedging devices were used more in informal style. Thirdly, the used hedging categories were found with significant difference in two genders and two styles.
Highlights
Hedges are linguistic items such as perhaps, somewhat, sort of, might, to a certain degree, it is possible that
This paper aims at investigating the effect of gender and style on the use of hedging by Persian speakers which hasn’t been considered yet
In order to find the data for formal style, 10 MA scientific theses written by 5 male and 5 female university students from applied linguistics were chosen as the corpus
Summary
Hedges are linguistic items such as perhaps, somewhat, sort of, might, to a certain degree, it is possible that,. Hedges can appear alone or in clusters They get their meaning from the context and, it is not possible to make any lists of hedges 459) states that the borders of natural language concepts are not clear-cut but fuzzy He provides a list of items he found to strengthen his theory. Hedges might be around nearly as long as language itself, it was only in 1966 that they became the topic of linguistic investigation As it was said, Weinreich (1966) examined their use, but called them “metalinguistic operators”.
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