Quod licet Iovi : hedges in US politicians' press conference speeches

This study aims to examine the use, frequencies and pragmatic functions of hedges found in US politicians' press conference speeches. In particular, we compare the scripted and the spontaneous components of the selected speeches as well as compare the use of hedges by female politicians with that by male politicians. To test Lakoff's (1973; 1975; 1990) claim on 'women's language', a frequent interpretation of which is that women use more tentative language than men, it was hypothesised that, in the speeches examined, women would use more hedges than men. To this aim, a corpus of 22 press conference speeches given by a number of US politicians was compiled, and the hedges identified were examined using Salager-Meyer's (1997) taxonomy. Both quantitative and qualitative methods were applied. The findings reveal that the approximators were most frequently used, followed by modal auxiliary verbs, introductory phrases, and modal lexical verbs. In contrast, adjectival, adverbial and nominal phrases, if-clauses and compound hedges were used the least. All hedges function as linguistic tools to generalise information, convey uncertainty, save speakers' face and express an opinion. Comparison by gender suggests that male politicians used more hedges than female politicians. Further studies on the use of hedging devices in press conference speeches may incorporate further criteria, such as prosodic information as well as geographical differentiation and may also be directed at verifying the existence of the relationship between the use of hedges and the success of persuading the audience.