The Bilingual Courtroom: Court Interpreters in the Judicial Process by Susan Berk-Seligson

Author:Susan Berk-Seligson
Language: eng
Format: mobi
Tags: legal studies, translation studies
ISBN: 9780226329475
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2017-05-23T04:00:00+00:00

Hedging

“Hedging” has been defined differently by linguists. As we have seen in chapter 7, Brown and Levinson (1978: 150) define a hedge as “a particle, word, or phrase in a set; it says of that membership that it is partial, or true only in certain respects.”4 Lakoff (1975: 66), who has analyzed hedging as a feature of women’s speech, finds that hedges “leave the addressee the option of deciding how seriously to take what the speaker is saying. It is for this reason that “John is sorta short” may be in the right context, a polite way of saying “John is short,” rather than a scaled-down comment on John’s actual height.”

The reason why hedging is so important in the courtroom is that it can be used by witnesses to mitigate, or soften the impact of, the point they are making. Danet (1980: 525), analyzing the question/answer sequences of the Watergate hearings, finds:

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