Abstract :
Despite the studies that addressed hedging and boosting strategies in academic discourse, few studies investigate hedges and boosters within spoken and written political discourse. It was crucial to conduct a comprehensive study on how hedges and boosters are utilized in political discourse because politicians frequently employ these two metadiscourse markers to communicate with the public. Considering the importance of political discourse and the significant role of metadiscourse signals, given a dearth of metadiscourse research on various written and spoken genres of political discourse across genders, this study investigated hedges and boosters in political genres. The purpose of this study was to develop a deep understanding of one of the rhetorical features of language use, which are specifically significant components of interactional metadiscourse markers namely as hedges and boosters within the written and spoken political genres. Thus, 100 political speeches by 50 males and 50 females were selected from two official websites (www.millercenter.org and www.rev.com), and 400 political tweets by 50 male and 50 female politicians (4 tweets each) from Canada, America, Australia, and Britain were collected and meticulously transcribed. The present study’s written and spoken sub-corpora were recorded from 2018 to 2022 and analyzed qualitatively and quantitively. The qualitative part explored the different types of hedges and boosters by male and female politicians. The quantitative part compared the frequencies of forms and functions of hedges and boosters across male and female politicians. However, findings indicated no notable variations between political tweets and speeches in the politicians’ uses of hedging devices but statistically heavier uses of boosting devices in political speeches. Equally important, comparison of hedging and boosting across spoken and written genres can help ESP teachers increase their students’ awareness of their dominant gender-specific and genre-specific ideologies conveyed through political figures’ lexico-grammatical choices.
