A Gender – Based study of Hedging in Selected TV interviews in Arabic: A New Approach to Hedging

Abstract

This paper is an attempt to investigate hedging in selected TV interviews where Arabic is the medium. The reason why the researcher has chosen this topic is that very little attention is given to study hedging and its relation to gender in TV interviews, specifically in Arabic. In the light of Brown and levinson's (1987) politeness principle and a combination of hedging taxonomies, hedging devices and their functions are contextually analyzed. Findings show that men hedge their utterances a little bit higher than their women counterparts in this particular context.These findings disregard what has been assumed by Robin lakoff (1975) that women lean to use hedges much more than men do in conversations. Furthermore, this study proves that context is the pivotal indicator in determining the type as well as the frequency of hedging in discourse.