The Effect of Gender and Style Variables on Hedging Devices among Persian Speakers

Language as a social phenomenon is affected by different factors such as age, gender, social status, culture, etc. Hedge is also considered as a part of language and a pragmatic phenomenon, seeming to be under the influence of these factors. This paper aims at investigating the effect of gender (female and male) and style (informal and formal) on the use of hedging by Persian speakers which hasn’t been considered yet. To this ends, in informal style, 8 Persian films (2012-2018) lasting for 12 hours and 54 minutes, 7 telephone conversations, each lasted for 20 minutes among genders, and some recorded daily conversations in different contexts were selected randomly. In formal style, 10 MA theses from different majors written by 5 Persian male and 5 female students were examined based on hedge taxonomies by Salager-Meyer (1997), Clemen (1996), Skelton (1988), and Jalilifar (2006). In this study, a new hedging category was added to their taxonomies. Running Chi-square analyses, it was found that, firstly, there was no significant difference between genders considering the use of hedges and no difference in the number of hedges used by them. Secondly, the hedging devices were used more in informal style. Thirdly, the used hedging categories were found with significant difference in two genders and two styles.