WEAK EPISTEMIC MODALITY IN THE UK PARLIAMENTARY DISCOURSE

Abstract

Discourse strategies of boosting and downtoning seem to play a paramount role in political discourse – persuading the electorate and defending one own’s position when ‘attacked’ liken the political battle to an actual war battle, whereby going on offensive and ducking into a trench, when the occasion demands it, may be linguistically effectuated through an array of linguistic means. Acting in defense in the context of political combat will be the focus of this paper, explored on a corpus taken from the 2010 UK parliamentary budget debate. Weak epistemic modality or hedging is studied through the use of weak epistemic adverbs, verbs, adjectives and nouns, its presence is measured through normalised frequencies and where possible compared to the BNC frequencies. The results point to a low presence of hedging in parliamentary discourse, both in comparison with strong epistemic modality in the same corpus and with the general everyday language.

Keywords

• weak epistemic modality
• parliamentary language
• hedging