hedging in political discourse

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1.1 Peculiarities of political discourse

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The above defines the understanding of discourse presented in the work as an act of verbal communication, which presupposes the presence of the addressee (the speaker or the writer) and the addressee (the listener or the reader). In turn, the latter can act as both a direct participant in the communicative act (listener) and the intended recipient of information (the potential reader).Political discourse is one of the most significant terms of political linguistics that has arisen at the intersection of two sciences, an important task of which is to study the diverse interrelations between language, thinking, communication and the political state of society in specific historical periods.From the point of view of A.P. Chudinov, the content of the political discourse should include all components present in the mind of the speaker and the listener (writing and reading) that can influence the generation and perception of speech. These components are understood as other texts, political preferences of the author, goals and tasks that he sets for himself in the process of creating the text, the political situation in which the text itself is being formed. The language of politics is established, first of all, by the means of mass communication, since they play an essential role in "spinning" political party activity, explaining the current political situation in the country and in the world. In essence, political discourse reflects the whole complex of relations between society and man. That is why the main function of this phenomenon is to form in recipients a separate fragment of perception of the world or a picture of the world as a whole. Investigating political discourse as a touchstone, it is possible to make a concrete picture of how various language collectives model their cultural values, how the social order propagates, what elements and components of the linguistic picture of the world are not part of the conscious speech strategies of the speakers, conceptual picture of the world, inherent in the team of speakers of any language.The text of the political speech is presented as extralinguistic information (referring to the general picture of the world) and sign information (related to the world picture transmitted through the sign, nomination).Political discourse has not only sense (connection with reality), but also an essential binding (subjective connection with one particular group or several groups of people). Different subjects of communication find a different reflection in the discourse: the forms of communication determine their content.Political discourse is understood as an institutional communication, which, unlike a person-oriented one, uses a certain system of professionally oriented signs, in other words, it has its own sublanguage (including vocabulary, phraseology and paremiology). 1.2 Hedging as one of MethodsIn modern linguistics, there continue to appear various forms and methods of political discourse analysis. Nevertheless, the researchers are constantly facing some problems that are specific to this field of science.Political discourse is regarded as an institutional phenomenon. The institutional nature of political discourse is determined by the fact that it refers only to those communicative acts that are produced in such an institutional environment as a government meeting, a parliament session, a congress of a political party, etc. The very same institutionalism is defined as a system of means for identifying, interpreting, evaluating, positioning and identifying social actors, relationships and objects of reality that are consolidated and legitimized by social institutions. The term "hedging" was borrowed to linguistics from the spheres of economy and insurance, where it has the widest application. Hedging in the economy involves risk insurance, aimed at protecting against various adverse events. In linguistics, George Lakoff is considered to be the founder of hedging theory. It should be noted that the term has almost completely retained its original meaning in linguistics, also denoting "speech insurance", i.e. protection of the speaker against radical, aggressive, rectilinear or insulting statements about the second party. Recipient can be one interlocutor or a whole audience. According to G. Lakoff, hedging is the use of words and phrases in speech, whose function is to make concepts more or less unclear. Thus, including in the utterance a certain term, choosing a certain structure or giving a certain intonation to the utterance, the speaker demonstrates their partial or complete detachment from the object in question, or from the illocutionary power of his own utterance.Although the definition of hedging was previously given by other researchers, such as G. Lakoff, B. Fraser, G. Klemen, Holmes, they appear somewhat narrow, not fully revealing its essence. In this regard, we propose our own definition of hedging, which reflects our understanding of this phenomenon. Hedging is the reception of speech insurance or speech caution, aimed at a veiled impact on the mass consciousness by deliberately avoiding the use of directly nominated verbal means. When hedging, these funds are replaced by different kinds of figurative lexical units and turns, somehow weakening the illocutionary power of the utterance. In addition to the replacement of directly nominative lexical units, it is also possible to add additional lexical units and hedge-turns that reduce the accuracy and category of the utterance and increase its objectivity and abstractness. Hedge acceptance is actualized in speech using lexical, stylistic and grammatical means, which are auxiliary.Many authors have addressed the interpretation of the hedging in the context of various studies. Thus, in the politeness theory P. Brown and S. Levinson put forward the pragmatic aspect of interactive interaction, and the hedge is the use of certain words and combinations as a means of preserving the "face" of the interlocutor. The concept of the face in interactive interaction was introduced by E. Goffman, who noted that the preservation of the face, like the generally accepted rules of the road, is a necessary condition for successful communication. The theory of courtesy Brown-Levinson relies on the concept of a positive and negative person. It is postulated that a positive person is responsible for the desire of a person to like others and to lead successful communication, while a negative person expresses the desire to defend their independence and preserve their personal freedom. Face-saving, including with the help of hedging, is recognized as an important task for every member of society.Corpus linguists also interpret hedging from sociolinguistic positions. It is important to note that case studies are conducted with the involvement of a substantial evidence base. In addition to verifying authentic language data on large arrays, body tools make it possible to investigate this phenomenon in different types of discourse, or different sub-genres of the corpus: academic, news, everyday, etc., i.e., focus on register features of hedging. For example, F. Farr et al. Followed the frequency of the hedging manifestation in different contexts of the Irish English Language Corpus (LCIE) 4 - conversations between family members, teacher comments about student work in the classroom, callers listening during broadcasts, exchanges of remarks (seller - buyer) at the counter of the store and the conversations of girlfriends. The distribution of such hedge markers as just, really, actually, probably, I think, a bit, kind of, sort of, you know, I suppose on the subgenres of the corps showed a significant contextual dependence. The lowest frequency of hedge markers is accounted for by the "seller-buyer" communication, in which their relatively low frequency is associated with the absence of the need to save the person in a dialogue between strangers. Communication between family members, where roles are fixed and the preservation of the person is secondary, is the second group with the least frequency use of the hedging.