Investigating Hedges in English and Persian Novels

This study probed different types of hedges in four novels in English and Persian (two novels in English and twonovels in Persian) across gender differences. To do so, forty paragraphs, ten paragraphs from each novel, wererandomly selected to be compared and contrasted on the basis of a framework provided by [1]. Salager-Meyer’sframework includes five types of hedges: shields, approximators, expressions that show the authors’ personaldoubt, emotionally-charged intensifiers, and compound hedges. The novels were analyzed in order tounderstand which writers have used more hedges in terms of the frequency and percentage of the occurrence ofhedges used by male and female writers in both languages. Chi-square revealed that there are no significantdifferences between English and Persian authors in using hedges. Moreover the results indicated that there aresignificant differences in the use of hedges by male English authors in comparison with male Persian authors,however there are no significant differences in the use of hedges by female English and Persian authors.

Keywords:

contrastive analysis , gender difference , hedge