A CORPUS-BASED ANALYSIS OF HEDGING IN BRITISH AND AMERICAN AMBASSADORIAL SPEECHES

Tóm tắt

This paper aims at investigating the communicative purpose of different forms of hedges in English discourse under the umbrella of corpus-based analysis. The two corpora of British and American ambassadorial speeches are compiled to provide the data source for a comparative analysis. Hedges are expressions showing the speaker’s tentativeness, indirectness and modality in speech communication. The results of this research shows that most hedges occurring in ambassadorial speeches are in patterns with modal lexical verbs, modal adjectives and modal adverbs as intensifiers and downtoners. Hedges in patterns with modal lexical verbs and modal adjectives occur with higher frequencies in the American ambassador corpus while more hedges with modal adverbs as intensifiers and downtoners are found in the British ambassador corpus. As such, it can be seen that American ambassadors appear to be more personal and subjective, whereas the British ambassadors seem to be more tentative and objective in speech delivery.