Gender Difference in Hedging: A Corpus-Based Study to TED Talks about Emotion

In the development of linguistics, many experts tried to identify the gender difference in language use from different perspectives. Many studies show that different genders have different preference when choosing hedging words to express their stands. But recently some other researches doubted the existence of such gender difference in pragmatic. This study established a corpus and analyzed 12 TED talks delivered by different genders and tried to find out whether the gender difference in hedging words exist. The result shows that gender difference does exist in word choice and lexical diversity. This study may shed some light for the following study to continue the research of gender difference from the angle of word choice.