HEDGING THE SPEECH ACT OF ADVICE BYIRAQI EFL UNIVERSITY STUDENTS

Abstract

By giving advice, people receive guidance on how to perform things in better ways. However, others’ opinions might be difficult to digest because some people do not usually accept being directed on what to do or not to do. This requires the language users to attenuate their advice to reduce the negative effect on the addressees by using specific linguistic devices to avoid placing imposition on the hearer or addressee, thus expressing politeness. However, the speech act of advice and how it is transformed by linguistic devices like hedges to communicate politeness has received very little attention. For that purpose, the current study aimed to examine how Iraqi EFL undergraduate students perform the speech act of advice and their use of hedging devices in two different contexts: student-instructor, and student-student relationships. An open-ended questionnaire in the form of a Discourse Completion Test (DCT) was used to collect the data from twenty-five Iraqi undergraduate students at the University of Tikrit. For data analysis. Hinkel’s (1997) taxonomy of advice types was used to find out how these students give advice linguistically, and Holmes’(1984) taxonomy of hedges categories was also used to examine the hedging devices performed by the participants to modify their advice with their achieved pragmatic functions. The results showed that the students used hedged advice more frequently when they advised an instructor while tended to use more direct advice to a friend. The highly frequent hedges device used in student-instructor relationships was personalized hedging to state opinions by using the parenthetical verbs while advice to peer friends included high rates of lexical devices that had the knowledge of the speaker as a stem to show cooperation and to elicit the hearer’s agreement. The findings highlighted the importance of understanding the social context in communication. The results of the study provided some insights for teachers on how pragmatic competence and cultural aspects aided students in becoming successful language users.