Hedging as a Tactic in German Political Discourse

This master's thesis is devoted to the study of the phenomenon of hedging as a tactic of conducting German political discourse. Key words: hedging, speech tactics, communicative strategies, German political discourse. Persuasion can be defined as having an oratorical talent for convincing others. This was the thought of Aristotle, who developed and expanded the field of rhetorical tradition. The question arises: who should be the speaker to most effectively provide a verbal impact on the audience - determined, confident and aggressive or diplomatic and inclined to build constructive relations? The focus of our research is the rhetoric of politicians, contributing to the implementation of the most conflict-free communication as possible, with the use of tactics such as hedging. The purpose of this research is to show, on the basis of the analysis of political texts, how cognitive-pragmatic methods of hedging function in modern German political discourse. The material for this study was an array of political texts (in particular public appearances) by German politicians: Merkel, Peter Tauber, and speeches by far-right politicians such as Alis Weidel and Georg Pazdersky. The conducted research allowed us to determine and prove the availability of hedging in the German political discourse, its criteria and ways of implementing it were revealed in the speech, as well as the classification of the means for implementing this method, and to be represented by syntactic structures, lexical units and morphological means. The practical value of the study lies in the possibility of using the results of the study in the analysis of political texts, as well as in the development of courses for the Faculty of Foreign Languages with the ambition of educating students in the understanding and application of speech tactics of hedging.