Exploring Hedging in Spoken Discourse: Insights from Corpus Analysis

The present research deals with the phenomenon of hedging language, mainly focusing on the context of spontaneous verbal interactions. The main aim of the study is to analyze the occurrence of hedges in English spoken discourse as captured in the Spoken British National Corpus 2014. The research process deals with the differences in the usage of approximators and shields existing among men and women across different age groups and levels of education. The research methodology involves creating six sub-corpora, measuring hedge dispersion, examining selected hedges to ascertain their hedging function within the context and calculating frequencies within each sub-corpus. The research outcomes point to the prevalence of shields in spoken discourse. Plausibility shields are commonly used while attribution shields show lower usage. Adaptors contribute to mitigating certainty in utterances, whereas rounders play a less prominent role. These findings emphasize the nuanced interplay between linguistic strategies and speaker characteristics in spoken communication and highlight the importance of cooperative principles in discourse.