Hedging in Newspaper Discourse
Hedging in Newspaper Discourse

Summary/Abstract: In this article an attempt is made to analyse frequency of occurrence and distribution of hedging devices in two types of newspaper articles: editorials and news stories. This choice was determined by a couple of reasons: first of all, the majority of articles and studies available mainly dealt with hedging practices in academic/scientific discourse. Secondly, newspapers carry articles of an extremely diverse character; consequently, linguistic means employed, hedging included, to achieve specific purposes are also divergent. The research was based on a detailed contextual analysis of 8,000 word corpus from 15 articles (editorials and news stories containing approximately the same number of words, i.e. 4,000) from four different quality papers. The results obtained lead to the conclusions that editorials employ more hedging devices, and the two newspaper genres use different types of hedges to mitigate the statements.

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