The metadiscursive aspects of advice giving: hedging and boosting in an agony aunt’s column

Abstract

It is a well-known fact that advice-giving practices may differ from culture to culture. While some societies such as British culture refrain from giving advice, others such as Turkish may prefer to give advice perceiving it as an indication of solidarity. Thus, precautions for preventing this nature of advice is taken by language itself in a systematic way through the employment of metadiscoursive elements.Thus, taking advice as a starting point for understanding metadiscursive aspects of language, this study will observe the tendencies in advice-giving in digital discourse through hedges and boosters. The data were analysed quantitatively and qualitatively, and patterns in the employment of hedges and boosters were uncovered. In addition, contexts in which the use of metapragmatic items were identified and contrasted to find out the functions of hedge and booster preferences in advice-giving.The findings of the study indicate the use of hedges and boosters in speech acts and their interpretation should be evaluated in terms of the use of that specific speech act and the tendencies cultures use in advice-giving is uncovered through this study.

Keywords

• Hedges
• boosters
• metadiscourse
• online advice-giving

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