ABSTRACT Yulia Fani Indriani, 2018. Hedges used in Stand-up Comedies Sakdiyah Ma’ruf’s The Bravest Coward and Michelle Buteau’s Marriage, Diamond and Ikea, English Study Program, Dian Nuswantoro University. Advisor: Dra. Sri Mulatsih, M.Pd. Keywords; Hedges, Politeness Strategies, Pragmatics, Stand-up comedy. This thesis is entitled Hedges used in Stand-up Comedies Sakdiyah Ma’ruf’s The Bravest Coward and Michelle Buteau’s Marriage, Diamond and Ikea. This study is aimed at describing the hedges found in Stand-up Comedies Sakdiyah Ma’ruf’s The Bravest Coward and Michelle Buteau’s Marriage, Diamond and Ikea and the reasons why the comics used those hedges. The researcher used descriptive qualitative method. The data were collected by Searching in YouTube, watching stand-up comedies, choosing stand-up comedy, downloading the stand-up comedies, then transcribing the stand-up comedies. The steps to analyse the data were reading the transcripts both stand-up comics, identifying the hedges, classifying the hedges based on taxonomy of hedges proposed by Salager – Meyer, finding the reason why both stand-up comics means in their utterances, finding the differences between both of the data and drawing the conclusion. Based on the analysis, seven types of Hedges are found in Sakdiyah Ma’ruf’s stand-up comedy which the dominant hedges used is modal auxiliary such us may, can, could, would and should (40%) meanwhile in Michelle Buteau’s stand-up comedy, the researcher found six types of hedges which the dominant hedges used by the speaker is also Modal Auxiliary verbs (42.86%). The other types of hedges belong to adjectival, adverbial, and nominal modal phrase; introductory phrases and modal lexical verbs. The reason why the stand-up comedians used those hedges is to show doubtees, uncertainty, politeness strategies and to minimize face threatening act (FTA) in their utterances. The differences between both of the data are that non -native speaker used more various hedges than the native one. Indonesian often used hedges in her utterances to show politeness, meanwhile the American sometimes is rarely used hedges since the background and the culture in America is saying straightly to the point. xiii
