Hedging through time and language: a corpus study of English and French film subtitles

Abstract

This study investigates the diachronic evolution of hedging strategies in English and French subtitle corpora across five decades (1970s-2010s). Using normalised frequency data per 10,000 tokens, the analysis distinguishes epistemic marks such as I think, maybe, je pense or peut-être from interactional and discourse-pragmatic hedges such as well, oh, uh, ah, bon, ben and euh. The results show that English maintains a stable epistemic baseline while progressively increasing interactional hedges, peaking in the 1990s and 2000s, with items such as well and oh. French, by contrast, consistently privileges interactional particles, culminating in the 2010s with high frequencies for ah, bon and bah. Both languages exhibit a convergent trend towards conversational authenticity, marked by greater use of interjections and pause fillers, though the timing and preferred forms differ. These findings highlight subtitles as a sensitive record of evolving pragmatic norms and highlight the interplay between linguistic tradition and cinematic dialogue practices.