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af.ii)Frequency of Hedges in the Corpus
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af.ii)Frequency of Hedges in the CorpusIn the following parts of this thesis, the frequency of hedges in the corpus will be dealt with and the results of quantitative and qualitative analysis will be described and interpreted. As discussed in Chapter 5.2, the extent of the corpus is 40 political interviews with British and American politicians.
Table : Frequency of Hedges The total number of hedges in the corpus is 1,320, as demonstrated in Table 14. In comparison to the number of boosters (3,449 in the whole corpus), this figure is considerably lower. The reason is that politicians aim at emphasizing certain facts which are important for their listeners, they try to be confident and sound persuasive. They also stress their own attitudes and opinions. Politicians do not want to show uncertainty, evasiveness or hesitation in front of the audience, at least not to a great extent. Additionally, boosters are used to emphasise positive information and hedges are used to attenuate negative facts, which, however, seems to be a general principle of their use. Male politicians used more hedging devices than females, in concrete terms 754 hedges, females used 566 attenuating devices. af.ii.1Frequency of Hedges Classified by their Contribution to Discourse MeaningThe present analysis is based on the classification proposed by Holmes (1984), which is explained in Section 8.2. As mentioned above, three types of hedges relating to discourse meaning are distinguished in this thesis: speaker-, hearer-, and content-oriented. Their frequency is summarized in Figure 4 and Table 15 below: Figure : Hedges Classified by their Contribution to Discourse Meaning
Table : Hedges Classified by their Contribution to Discourse Meaning Table 15 demonstrates that the most frequent category of hedges in the corpus are content-oriented hedges. They occur in 857 instances in total. They are followed by speaker-oriented hedges, however, their frequency of occurrence is significantly lower, 304 instances. Finally, hearer-oriented hedges are the least frequent kind of hedges, appearing 159 times in the whole corpus. Generally, politicians concentrate on asserting themselves in front of their audience and they do not want to show uncertainty, therefore, the number of boosters in the corpus prevails over the number of hedges. Content-oriented hedges function as devices which reduce responsibility of politicians for their claims. If a politician uses adverbials such as possibly, maybe or probably, the likelihood of a potential accusation of lying is decreased. Speaker-oriented hedges express assumption and hesitation of the speaker, which may be a signal that the politician is uncertain or that s/he withholds some information. However, it is very difficult to determine if the politician really does not know the information or if s/he deliberately withholds it. Sometimes s/he must do it because some information is confidential and cannot be disclosed to the public. Hearer-oriented hedges express uncertainty that is addressed towards the hearer. This type of hedges is not so frequent since politicians concentrate more on hedging the content of their messages and not on the hearer so much. af.ii.2Occurrence of the Most Frequent HedgesIn this section, the hedges with the highest overall frequency of occurrence in the corpus will be described. As with boosters, this concerns all hedges in the corpus regardless of their contribution to discourse meaning. The following table demonstrates the most frequent hedges in the corpus used by male and female politicians:
Table : The Most Frequent Hedges in the Corpus As is evident from the table above, all these expressions also function as boosters, even though some of them, such as well, actually and just, predominantly function as hedges. The most frequent hedge in the whole corpus is the discourse marker well, followed by just and you know. Concerning the differences between male and female politicians, there is a slightly higher distribution of well in females. By contrast, males produced just, you know, I think and actually more frequently. Download 1.35 Mb. Share with your friends:
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