A Study of Hedges in Courtroom Oral Arguments from the Perspective of Contextual Adaptation

This paper tries to explore the frequencies of hedges used by lawyers and judges as well as how hedges achieve the contextual adaptation of social world in courtroom oral arguments. 40 courtroom arguments were selected from the United States Supreme Court from 2016 to 2020 as the data source. Vershueren's contextual adaptation theory (1999) was adopted as the theoretical basis. Meanwhile, with the aid of computer software TagAnt, AntConc 3.2.0, SPSS Statistics 23.0 and manual checking, this study finds following results: firstly, lawyers use each type of hedges more often than judges, which indicates that hedges are more favored by lawyers than judges in courtroom arguments; in addition, for accuracy-oriented hedges, modal verbs occur the highest, disjuncts the last; for hearer-oriented hedges, personal attributions appear the most frequently, tag questions the least; for speaker-oriented hedges, there-be sentence pattern occur the highest, and epistemic judgmental verbs the last; secondly, the relevant social factors identified in this study for the adaptation of hedges are courtroom norms, and the power relations between courtroom participants. It is expected that this research may have implications for the courtroom interaction.