Open AccessHedging In Ted Talks: A Corpus-Based Pragmatic Study
Author(s) -
Tri Nuraniwati,
Alfelia Nugky Permatasari
Publication year - 2022
Publication title -
jeells (journal of english education and linguistics studies)/jeels (journal of english education and linguistics studies)
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
eISSN - 2503-2194
pISSN - 2407-2575
DOI - 10.30762/jeels.v8i2.2969
Subject(s) - computer science , linguistics , corpus linguistics , communicative competence , competence (human resources) , concordance , natural language processing , artificial intelligence , psychology , philosophy , social psychology , medicine
Hedging is a communicative strategy and a form of pragmatic competence which plays a central role in delivering the intended message of the speaker. Commonly observed in two-way conversations, hedges as hedging devices are also present in monologues. This study investigates the most common hedges used in popular monologues TED Talks as well as observes the various communicative strategies they denote. 130 transcripts of the talks, taped from 2002-2019 taken from the official website of TED (ted.com), are collected to build a corpus of 337,302 tokens. Through corpus-based analysis using concordance software AntConc 3.5.0, 48 most common hedges are inserted for frequency search. The search hits show that the most frequently-used hedges in the corpus are ‘just,’ ‘could,’ ‘you know,’ ‘actually,’ ‘I think,’ and ‘kind of’ with the numbers of occurrence 1107, 554, 541, 530, 390, and 309 respectively. From the analyses of the functions of the most frequent hedges, it can be concluded that each of the hedges serves distinctive pragmatic strategy which contributes in the communicative processes of the talks.