A STUDY OF HEDGING IN NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR PEACE AND ORDER’S ANNOUNCEMENTS

Abstract

This article is a thesis study for graduation fulfillment which is concerned the use of hedging in announcements issued by the National Council for Peace and Order (NCPO). Within the period of caretaker government, there are 122 announcements published by the NCPO in total.  Hedging of the Maxims, adapted by George Yule (1996) will be applied in this study. This study is aimed to investigate the hedging strategies used in announcements, define their grammatical features, and count all occurring frequency.   According to the analysis, it reveals that the NCPO hedged in their announcement with 3 out of 4 maxims. The variety of such can be sorted into 15 sub-strategies. Aside from the perspective of hedging of the maxims, the results are also found that there are diversities of grammatical features such as nouns, auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and collective nouns.  With the frequencies found, the NCPO tended to hedge with the Maxim of Quality the most often especially modalities and impersonality, which includes subject omission. For grammatical features, the most frequent strategies used were auxiliary verbs, adverbs, and nouns, orderly.