To Hedge or Not to Hedge: A Pragmatic Study of Hedging in Jordanian Arabic

This study aims to explore the frequency of use and types of hedging devices produced by Jordanian Arabic speakers. The study also seeks to ascertain the pragmatic functions of hedging in Jordanian Arabic. Two types of instruments are employed; a survey instructing the participants to provide some instances from their daily use of language, representing hedging as a linguistic device in Jordanian Arabic and notes of daily observations that take place between friends, colleagues, and family members. A total of 763 hedgers of all types are piled from the daily observations and the survey comprising 86 participants. The data are analyzed and transformed into numerical values in the form of percentages. The findings of the study depict that hedging is a common linguistic device, characterizing Jordanian Arabic and the commonest type is compound hedgers with 50% of the total instances. The findings also reveal that hedging performs various functions in Jordanian Arabic: interpersonal politeness, subjectivity markers, vagueness, fuzziness, and depersonalization. The study presents a novel syntactic categorization of hedging in Jordanian Arabic that differs from Modern Standard Arabic and English.