Abstract

A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF HEDGES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL EDITORIALS

Ali Sabah Hassan, Asst. Prof Nadya Khairy Muhamed Said

Volume: 10 Issue: 3 2020

Abstract:

The use of hedges in newspaper editorialsis important as the claims of editorialists should be cautious when criticizing issues and tackling controversial subject matters. Furthermore, hedges play an essential role where they may affect how readers approvethe truth of the information presented in editorials. This study is aimedto identify the pragmatic functions of hedges and their formal realizations in the American political editorials.Twenty- five editorials,randomly selectedfrom the American online newspapers, and they were analyzedin accordance with a proposed model which is based on the works of the researchers; Hyland (1998), Neff van Aertsalaer and Bunce (2011) and Malášková (2014). The study has concluded that the use of hedges in the American political editorials achieves three hedging functions subsumed under the categories; a) content-oriented hedges, b) writer-oriented hedges, and c) reader-oriented hedges, and the category ofcontent-oriented hedges is the most frequent functional category. These functions can be summed up that using hedges allows the writer not only to invest a certain degree of commitment into the truth value of the proposition, but also to establish and maintain contact with the readers. In additions, single-lexical hedging forms, specifically ‘epistemic modal verb’ and ‘epistemic adverb’ are the most frequent formal realizations of content-oriented hedges, whilethe majority ofwriter oriented hedges is dominantly realized by non-lexical hedging forms and the strategy of ‘attribution to literature’ of its two basic types verbaland verblessbeing the most frequent ones.And as for reader-oriented function,the non-lexical hedging forms, particularly the strategies of ‘questions’ and ‘if clause’ are the most frequent formal realizations to fulfill this function.

DOI: http://doi.org/10.37648/ijrssh.v10i03.007

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