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Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse
strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an
utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years
hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and
Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from
various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory,
genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of
vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of
current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety
of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages,
investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text
types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to
morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this
volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts
and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data.
This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone
unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning
of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations
therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the
context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.
Table of Contents
Introduction
Pragmatic Competence: The Case of Hedging
Bruce Fraser
A Contrastive Approach to Vague Nouns
Gisle Andersen
Hedges in Context: Form and Function of sort of and kind of
Anita Fetzer
Mitigating and being vague in Interpreter-Mediated Discourse
Bernd Meyer and Birte Pawlack
The Diachrony of Rounders and Adaptors: Approximation and Unidirectional Change
Wiltrud Mihatsch
Hyperbolic Approximative Numerals in Cross-Cultural Comparison
Eva Lavric
Approximative Expressions and their Loose Uses in Chinese
Yongping Ran
Weakening or Strengthening?: A Case of Enantiosemy in Plato’s Gorgias
Claudia Caffi
Position and Scope of Epistemic Phrases in Planned and Unplanned American
English
Elise Kärkkäinen
Pragmatic Functions of Parenthetical I think
Gunther Kaltenböck
Parenthetical Hedged Performatives
Stefan Schneider
On the relationship between Attenuation, Discourse Particles and Position
Antonio Briz andMaria Estellés
Subject Index
For further information or to discuss review copies or adoption of this
book, please contact jdavis@emeraldinsight.com
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