Gender Differences in the Use of Lexical Hedges in Selected TV Program in Arabic

Abstract

Abstract:

Abstract In the last few decades, there has been extensive research on the differences between women’s and men’s use of language in the field of linguistics. The present quantitative study aims to investigate whether there are differences in hedging use between male and female participants. It also aims to examine whether these differences are affected by the gender of the addressee. The data were taken from Libyan TV program. Two episodes were chosen randomly. Each episode consisted of two males and two females. Frequency counts were used to analyse the obtained data. After collecting and analysing the data, the findings reveal that female participants tend to use hedging more than the male participants and both genders use fillers, adverbs and lexical verbs more than the other lexical hedging. Moreover, the findings show that participants of both genders use hedging when they talk to male participants more than when they talk to female participants.