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Hedging in Political Discourse : An Analysis of Hedging in an American City Council

This thesis seeks to investigate the usage of hedges in political discourse in the Tampa City Council for the purpose of examining whether or not women hedge more than men in this area. An analysis of the occurrence of hedges illustrated that women hedged more than men for various purposes in this meeting. These occurrences mostly involved the epistemic modal function and shields which indicate uncertainty about the utterance and certainty about the utterance respectively. The results also illustrate how political discourse is still an area dominated by men in the sense that men had significantly more speech time than women during this meeting. However, the results also disprove Lakoff’s claim that women hedge simply to signal uncertainty and tentativeness.

Identiferoai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:hig-14603
Date January 2013
CreatorsPlayer Pellby, Ellen
PublisherHögskolan i Gävle, Avdelningen för humaniora
Source SetsDiVA Archive at Upsalla University
LanguageEnglish
Detected LanguageEnglish
TypeStudent thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text
Formatapplication/pdf
Rightsinfo:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess

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