Communicative and pragmatic functions of hedging

Abstract

The phenomenon of a politician’s linguistic personality is of particular interest in modern political linguistics. The reference to the speech of the former Prime Minister of Great Britain Rishi Sunak, related to the sphere of political communication, is made, as it allows us to form an evaluative idea of the persuasiveness of a politician as a public figure. Th e object of this study is the use of hedge processing tools in the American political discourse. Hedges, representing an open set of speech fencing tools actualized in the context (lexical, grammatical, syntactic, stylistic, prosodic), are actively used by politicians in various genres and subgenres of political discourse and serve to more fully reveal the portrait of the linguistic personality. An appeal to the pragmatics of speech fencing tools as discursive markers of idiostyle in the structure of a specific linguistic personality allows us to identify various types of discursive markers in the idiodiscourse of the former Prime Minister of Great Britain and determine their communicative and pragmatic function. An analysis of the main discursive markers of speech fencing allowed us to conclude that the choice of one or another hedge marker is influenced by the personal characteristics of the politician, his psychological state, as well as the extralinguistic context.

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