The Differences of Lexical Hedges Used by Male and Female Participants in NUDC And WUDC 2021

Hedges has received much attention in relation to conversational rules as a mean to facilitate turn-taking, politeness, mitigate face-threats, but it is also considered a means of conveying vagueness purposely. The aim of this study is identify the lexical hedges are used by male and femaleparticipants in NUDC and WUDC 2021.This research was qualitative research. The object of this research was the recording of NUDC 2020 and WUDC 2021 debate accessed from YouTube. The researcher used table checklist as the instrument of this research. There were two findings of this research; (1) The lexical hedges made by male participants in NUDC and WUDC 2021 were modal auxiliary verb, lexical verb, probability adjective, adverb, adverb of frequency, if clause, compound hedges, and fillers; (2) The lexical hedges made by female participants in NUDC and WUDC 2021 were modal auxiliary verb, lexical verb, probability adjective, noun, adverb, adverb of frequency, compound hedges, and fillers. To conclude, male and female participants made many kinds lexical hedges in NUDC and WUDC 2021. It was suggested for further research to conduct another research in the same field to this present research about the use of lexical hedges among the male and female students in more wide sample and deep data analysis.


INTRODUCTION
Debate is contention in argument; strife, dissension, quarrelling, controversy; especially a formal discussion of subjects before a public assembly or legislature, in Parliament or in any deliberative assembly in order to aquire a change (McCarthy in (Rosanti & Jaelani, 2018).Debate is a teaching activity to improve verbal communication and critical thinking skills.Debate is presented as a valuable learning activity for teaching critical thinking and improving communication skills.Debating is an effective pedagogical strategy because of the level of responsibility for learning and active involvement required by all student debaters.Debate can motivate students' thinking, moreover if they must defend their stand or opinion which is in contradiction with them.This activity can involve all students to be active, not only debate performer.In debating or giving opinion both women and men will vary.It is possible that women will apply lexical hedges more than men.Holmes restates Lakoff's theory (Rosanti & Jaelani, 2018); "women are characterized by linguistics features such as lexical hedges".The language used between female and male students is different in several aspects.Male and female has many differences, it could be indicated when they state something, for instance in expressing their idea about something (Rosanti &Jaelani, 2021).It can be seen from the characteristic of women's linguistic features such as in using lexical hedges.
Hedges are also called hedging.Hedging has received much attention in relation to conversational rules as a mean to facilitate turn-taking, politeness, mitigate face-threats, but it is also considered a means of conveying vagueness purposely.Politeness and hedging have become forms of social interpretation of verbal and non-verbal behavior revolving around the concept of saving face.Thus, they play a crucial role in social interaction strategies.In language studies, hedging has come to designate a manifestation of language by means of which speakers take precautionary measures to protect themselves from the negative effect of their sayings or to protect themselves or their interlocutors from any harm to the concept of face caused by their utterances.There were many studies on the analysis of the differences of lexical coverage used by men and women.As an investigation carried out by (Rosanti & Jaelani, 2018), it has been revealed that there is a difference between women and respondents of men by selecting words of character.Women respondents tend to use more lexical hedges than male respondents.In this sense, female respondents often use filling hedges, such as fillings frequently.HMM, HMM, you know your speech.
The respondents of men often use filler lexical hedges frequently.I think Uhh and Hmm are thinking about his speech.Women respondents have a wide variety of words by selecting wording words, but respondents of men are not as easy to select words of lexical coverage.More recent, another study was from (Engström, 2018), but after 63.0% of valid valid, 67.6% of valid tokens were produced by women, I found that.With regard to the expression of beliefs and opinions, the results indicate that I believe, and certainly support the traditional gender characteristics.Similarly, (Namaziandost et al., 2018) discovered that there is a difference between women and respondents of men by selecting words from a letter letter.Women respondents tend to use lexical coverage than men respondents.In such a method, filling more frequently filled as filling hedges.Hmm, Uhh, you know, yes, yes, yes, it was more frequently used by the respondents of women in their speech.The male respondents are the most used filler lexical hedges repeatedly, yes, yes, to their speech.
Many studies conducted research on the differences of lexical hedges between male and female students based on Lakoff's theory, however this study will conduct a research about lexical hedges between male and female from Namasaraev cited in (Rosanti & Jaelani, 2018)who divided nine kinds of lexical hedges in terms of its classification, namely; modal auxilary verb, lexical verb, probability adjective, noun, adverb, adverb of frequency, "if" clause, compound hedges, and fillers.The study of Hedges is important to do since it has own different meaning between male and female utterances, furthermore the study of hedges has been not conducted yet in debating onNUDC and WUDC 2021.

METHODOLOGY
This research was qualitative research.In this type of research, the researcher collected, classified, analyzed, and drew conclusion based on the data analysis without making a generalization.The object of this research was the recording of NUDC 2020 and WUDC 2021 debate accessed from youtube.The researcher used table checklist as the instrument of this research.The recording was used to make lists of the kinds of lexical hedges used by the students in NUDC and WUDC debating and the lexical hedges checklist was used to classify the hedges based on the theory.In doing the research, the researcher did some steps in collecting the data; (1) The researcher accessed the youtube link of NUDC and WUDC 2021; (2) The researcher watched the debating NUDC and WUDC in youtube; (3) The researcher wrote the transcript of the video of NUDC and WUDC; (4) The researcher made list of word which indicated lexical hedges; (5) The researcher classified the hedges based on the checklist; (6) The researcher interpreted and discussed the result; and (6) The researcher concluded the result in the last chapter.

The Lexical Hedges used by Male and Female participants in NUDC 2020
There were some hedges used by the male and female participants in NUDC 2020.For detail data about how many hedges made by the male and female participants in NUDC 2020, it can be seen in the following table.Table 1 shows that there are four male participants in NUDC 2020, the male participants make lexical hedges which consist of 38 modal auxilary verb, 12 lexical verb, 7 probability adjective, noun, 3, adverb 2, no adverb of frequency, 2 if clause, and no compound hedges and fillers.The result of lexical hedges made by female participants in NUDC is in the following table.
Table 2. Table 2 shows that there are four female participants in NUDC 2020, the female participants make lexical hedges which consist of 22 modal auxilary verb, 39 lexical verb, no probability adjective, no noun, 1 adverb, no adverb of frequency, if clause, compound hedges and fillers.

The Lexical Hedges used by Male and Female participants in WUDC 2021
For detail data about the hedges made by the male and female participants in WUDC 2021, it can be seen in the following table.Table 4 shows that there are five female participants in WUDC 2021, the female participants make lexical hedges which consist of 46 modal auxilary verb, 133 lexical verb, 10 probability adjective, 1 noun, 6 adverb, 8 adverb of frequency, no if clause, no compound hedges, and 12 fillers.Below is the summary of lexical hedges made by male and female participants in NUDC 2021 and WUDC 2021 is presented in the table below.Regarding to table 4.5, the lexical hedges made by male participants are total 140 hedges with 46,42% of modal auxilary verb, 30,71% of lexical verb, 9,28% of probability adjective, 2,14% noun, 4,28% of adverb, no adverb of frequency, 1,42% of if clause, no of compound hedges, and 5,71% of fillers.The most dominant lexical hedges made by the female participant is modal auxilary verb.Below is the summary of lexical verb made by female participants.
Table 6 Regarding to table 4.7, the lexical hedges made by female participants are total 278 hedges with 24,46% of modal auxilary verb, 61,87% of lexical verb, 3,59% of probability adjective, 0,35% of noun, 2,51% of adverb, 2,87% of adverb of frequency, no if clause, no of compound hedges, and 4,31% of fillers.The most dominant lexical hedges made by the female participant is lexical verb.

Discussion
The first aim of this research is to identify the lexical hedges made by male participants in NUDC and WUDC 2021 and the result shows that the lexical hedges made by male participants are modal auxilary verb, lexical verb, probability adjective, adverb, if clause, compound hedges, and fillers.It indicates that the male participants of NUDC and WUDC 2021 made all of lexical hedges except Adverb of Frequency.This research finding is in line with the theory of Holmes in (Amanda, 2017) who states in general, men's speech was seen as logical, concise and dealing with important topics, whereas women's speech was rated as emotional, flowery, confused and wordy.She claims that, "a number of linguistic features were used more often by women than by men, because women often express uncertainty and lack of confidence in speech".Moreover, the result of study by (Engström, 2018)also supports this research finding which is found that lexical verb is usually made by man while using spoken language.
The second aim of this research is to identify the lexical hedges made by female participants in NUDC and WUDC 2021 and the result shows that the lexical hedges made by female participants are modal auxilary verb, lexical verb, probability adjective, noun, adverb, adverb of frequency, compound hedges, and fillers.This research finding is in line with Lakoff in (Azizah, 2021) who explains that the linguistic feature often used by women is lexical hedges like you know, I mean, well.Most women more often use these linguistic featurestoexpress opinions.Furthermore, Holmes restates Lakoff's theory (2018) "women are characterized by linguistics features such as lexical hedges".
Moreover, the result of this research indicates that there is a difference of the use of lexical hedges among male and female participants in NUDC and WUDC 2021, the total number of lexical hedges used by famale participants are more than what male participants made.It can be seen from the characteristic of women's linguistic features such as in using lexical hedges.It is supported by Lakoff in (Rosanti & Jaelani, 2018)who states that linguistic features are used more by women than men because women express uncertainty more often and have less confidence inconveying speech.The differences in men's and women's languages include vocabulary, voice, tone, style, andsyntacticstructure.In general, men's speech is considered logical, concise, and prioritizes important topics.Meanwhile, women are considered emotional, full of pleasantries, and talk at length.Moreover, this research finding is also supported by (Namaziandost et al., 2018)who found that there are differences among female and male respondents' propensity in selecting word lexical hedges.Female responders tend to utilize more lexical hedges than male responders.In such manner, most frequently lexical hedges of fillers such as; hmm, uhh, you know, yeah were used most frequently by female respondents in their utterances; while male respondents most repeatedly utilized lexical hedges of fillers like; I think, uhh, yeah in their utterances.The previous study result iss similar to this present study which found that female participants used more frequently lexical hedges filler rather than man participants while debating.

Table 3 .
Lexical Hedges used by Male Participants in WUDC Table3reveales that there are three male participants in WUDC 2021, the male participants make lexical hedges which consist of 27 modal auxilary verb, 31 lexical verb, 6 probability adjective, no noun, 4 adverb, no adverb of frequency, no if clause, and no compound hedges and 8 fillers.The result of lexical hedges made by female participants in WUDC is in the following table.

Table 4 .
Lexical Hedges used by Female Participants in WUDC

Table 5 .
Summary of Lexical Hedges made by Male Participants . Summary of Lexical Hedges made by Female Participants