Transparency and ambiguity in diplomatic discourse to the wider public: an analysis of hedging and boosting in media interviews

Diplomatic discourse is recognized as highly contextualized and ritualized within the established textual genres of the diplomatic profession, so that experts may be able to infer the conveyed messages regardless of their surface form. More recently, however, diplomatic professionals have increasingly taken on a more public role, communicating with the wider public through media interviews and social media. The language they use in such contexts has not been fully conceptualized and discussed in linguistics, but it is of central relevance to understand how institutional representatives address very sensitive topics within an international panorama, while (not) ensuring a clear and transparent communication. This study utilizes a mixed-methods approach, combining both quantitative and qualitative analysis, to investigate a corpus of media interviews with diplomatic professionals on current topics of international relevance. Gathered between 2020 and 2022 from major English-language international broadcasting companies, the corpus includes both native and non-native speakers that use English as a vehicle for communication. In this study, the linguistic strategies of subjectivization and depersonalization (Martín Martín 2008; Hyland 1998) were analysed to understand how and to what extent diplomats choose (in)directness to communicate with transparency. Results show that diplomats, whether native or non-native speakers, mainly rely on transparent communication, expressing subjective opinions without mitigation and underusing constructions that conceal or imply agentivity