Abstract
While there has been ample research that has addressed hedging in academic discourse and everyday conversation; studies that investigate hedges in relation to political debates are ...
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While there has been ample research that has addressed hedging in academic discourse and everyday conversation; studies that investigate hedges in relation to political debates are tremendously few. The purpose of the study is to pragmatically investigate hedging devices in political discourse to find out how hedging devices are manipulated in Salar Mahmoud’s answers to different questions raised by the researchers in an interview concerning the economic crises in Kurdistan Regional Government on the one hand and a UK Parliament debate banning Donald Trump from Britain on the other hand. The study reveals that hedging pragmatically can be seen in the observance of the maxims presented by Paul Grice(1989) by being not ambiguous, being relevant, saying only what the speaker believes to be true and giving enough information adequate to the questions raised.
