Concealment and Equivocation as Hedging Strategies in Political Interviews: Perspectives from Pragmatics and Sociology of Communication

Abstract

Previous frameworks used in conceptualising hedging in linguistic research have limitations when applied to political interview discourse, where hedging does not manifest as property of word classes or indicator of non-prototypicality of objects but as use vague, false and ambiguous langauage.This study examined hedging phenomena in political interview context based on insights from pragmatics and sociology of communication.The specific objectives of the study were to determine how hedging manifests through couplet linkages in political interviews, identify the nature of hedging in political interview discourse, and to extend hedging classificatory framework proposed in research conducted in pragmatics. A corpus-qualitative research design was adopted in order to achieve the objectives of the study. The corpus comprised fifty(50) conversational turns from a political interview granted to TELL Magazine by former Nigerian president, Rtd Gen. Ibrahim Badamasi Babangida (IBB). The interview was segmented into three sections comprising sections on June 12 Presidential Elections, events During Rtd Gen. IBB regime and events during Rtd Gen. Sani Abacha’s regime. Adjacency pairs in the three sections were identified and mapped on to Stensrom’s typology of couplet linkages to determine their structure.The propositional content of each of the adjacency pairs were then micro-analysed using pragmatic constructs (Grice Cooperative Principles) and sociology of communication (Interpersonal Deception Theory).The results indicated that hedging manifests as chaining, embedding, coupling and elliptical coupling in terms of structure.The results of the analysis of propositions in the conversational turns further showed that concealment and equivocation are the strategies used to withhold information and evade questions during political