Hedging in Political Press Conferences of Tenth President of Iran

Hedging is a rhetorical strategy which speaker employs for lack of a full commitment either to the full category membership of a term or expression (content mitigation), or to the intended illocutionary force of the utterance (force mitigation). Hedging must be considered as an intentional action. The speaker chooses a linguistic device over the propositional content of the message which will affect the interpretation of the utterance; either modifies the content of the utterance or its force. Although hedges have no certain lexical meaning; they have powerful functional and pragmatic meaning. This research has been done by means of descriptive-analytical method with purpose of definition, introducing of applications of hedges based on Fraser(2009), and finally a case study of hedges in political discourse of press conferences of president Ahmadinejad within the framework of critical discourse analysis. The results show that the president (Ahmadinejad) has used hedging as a political language strategy to express vagueness and evasion which are one of the skillfully policies in political speech. He applied passive voice and impersonal pronouns more than other kinds of hedges.