The present study investigates the use of hedging devices in the readers’ comment section of the newspaper The Guardian Online. Two comment sections were chosen for the contrastive study: ‘Politics’ in the subsection ‘Comment is free’ and the series ‘Problem solved’ in the subsection ‘Life and style’. The corpus-based analysis of the frequency of hedges has revealed that the incidence of hedging devices in comments on personal issues is higher (by 19.2%) than on political articles. Three of the most frequently occurring hedging devices, namely, might, SEEM and I (don’t) think underwent further contextual analysis: the utterances containing these items were classified according to their illocutionary force, applying Bach’s (2003) classification of illocutionary acts. The most commonly hedged speech act types, characteristic of each section, were revealed.  Subsequently, an attempt was made to account for these findings from the perspective of ‘face’ and ‘facework’ as represented by Brown and Levinson (1987), Lim and Bowers (1991), MacGeorge, Lichtman and Pressey (2002), Ting-Toomey and Kurogi (1998). Since hedging is considered to be an effective strategy in minimizing ‘threats’ to the face of the addressee, it has  been possible to conclude that in discussions of personal issues participants are more concerned to ‘save’ the addressee’s face than in the case of political matters where the comment writers’ ‘self-face seems to be in the forefront.

Notre étude porte sur la constitution de l’événement médiatique particulièrement dans la presse en ligne, étant un dispositif qui permet l’interaction entre les journalistes, les acteurs politiques et les lecteurs. D’une part, nous nous occupons de la mise en récit de l’événement dans le journal électronique, en analysant la façon dont les journalistes ont traité, évoqué et raconté cet événement. D’autre part, nous étudions la façon dont les journalistes et les lecteurs se rencontrent à travers le dispositif de la presse en ligne qui leur permet de commenter, de discuter et de se plonger dans des débats autour des événements émergeants. Plus précisément, nous étudions comment la presse en ligne américaine, irakienne et saoudienne- représentée dans notre corpus par le Los Angeles Times, le Washington Post, Almada, et Alhayat- a constitué l’événement du retrait des troupes américaines d’Irak qui a eu lieu entre 2010 et 2011. Ensuite, nous étudions comment les commentaires des lecteurs de ces journaux électroniques ont contribué à la modification, voire à la reconfiguration des récits racontés par les journalistes. L’objectif de cette recherche est d’analyser comment les événements médiatiques sont organisés par les discours de la presse en ligne, et de démontrer que les publics peuvent, eux-aussi, participer à la constitution des récits des événements à travers leurs interventions et leurs feedbacks dans les champs consacrés aux commentaires des lecteurs dans les journaux électroniques. / This research studies the formation of the media event particularly in the electronic press, as a support that allows the interaction between journalists, politicians and readers. On one hand, we deal with the configuration of the story of the event in the electronic newspaper, by analyzing how journalists treated and narrated this event. On the other hand, we study how journalists and readers meet through the support of the electronic press which allows them to comment, discuss and delve into debates related to the emerging events. Herein, we study how the American, Iraqi and Saudi electronic press, represented in our corpus by the Los Angeles Times, the Washington Post, Almada, and Alhayat, configured the event of the American withdrawal from Iraq between 2010 and 2011. In addition, we study how the comments of the readers on these electronic newspapers have contributed to the modification or the reconfiguration of the stories told by journalists. The objective of this project is to analyze how media events are organized and formed in the electronic press, and to show how the public can also participate in shaping the media stories through the space designated for readers' comments in electronic newspapers.