Would as a hedging device in an Irish context: an intra-varietal comparison of institutionalised spoken interaction

Hedging is an interactional strategy that speakers and writers avail of in communication, and they do so in a variety of ways and for different reasons. The purpose of this study is to look at one hedging device in two institutional settings of face-to-face spoken interaction in Irish settings. Hedging is borne out of its conditions of use, its context, which extends beyond the institutional setting to the society which initially institutionalised these interactions. We have chosen to look at the modal verb would as a hedging device in the following institutionalised settings in Irish society: (1) radio phone in on national Irish radio (henceforth RPI), and (2) post-observation teacher training interaction in an Irish university as part of a post graduate teacher training programme (hereafter POTTI). For the purposes of our analysis, we will use two corpora of transcribed data from these settings. In doing so, we aim to build on the sentiments of Clemen (1997: 235) and show that hedging is achieved primarily by setting utterance in context rather than by straightforward statement. Indeed it is our contention that ‘context’ should be extended to levels that allow for the inclusion of the socio-cultural norms prevalent in the setting from which our data has emerged.