Chapter 5 - Hedges and Gender in the Inner and Expanding Circle

Summary

Women have often been profiled as prototypical users of hedges, i.e. linguistic devices such as I believe lowering the pragmatic force of a statement to potentially save interlocutors’ faces. Still, empirical investigations of gender-preferential hedging as employed by learners – specifically in postcolonial territories – are not available. This study establishes corpus-linguistically a) whether men or women use more hedges in native-speaker and postcolonial learner contexts, b) what factors determine hedge choice and c) on a theoretical level, the relation between learners and the evolutionary progress of their postcolonial habitat. A total of 1,530 hedges are extracted from texts by British native speakers and by learners (maximally level B1 in the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages) from Hong Kong, the Philippines and Singapore. Males use more hedges in Britain and Singapore, while female learners employ more hedges in Hong Kong and the Philippines, but the concrete hedge chosen is determined by region – with Singapore being notably different from other territories – mode and gender. More generally, the findings suggest that speaker status differences, i.e. whether speakers are second-language or foreign-language users, may be less important in explaining linguistic choices than the evolutionary status of their sociolinguistic habitat.