A Pragmatic Analysis Of Hedging In Interpersonal Communication

When we speak or write, we are unlikely to be very clear, precise, or explicit about what we mean-and perhaps could not be-but are, on the contrary, vague, indirect, and unclear about just what we are committed to. Hedging, in effect, demonstrates this nature of human language and expands it to further significance. In describing things, events or experiences, hedged expression may indicate a closer or looser assignment to a conceptual category. Hedge/hedging, primarily coined as a semantic concept, finds itself observed from a pragmatic perspective in the paper. For expressing quantities, a hedge may convey the speaker's attitude about the quantity itself and convey assumptions about the speaker's beliefs. Hedging may be used to directly express the degree of commitment a speaker makes to a proposition, or convey other propositional attitudes such as personal evaluation more indirectly. In addition, it may serve social functions such as engendering camaraderie and softening implicit criticisms. Hedged remarks may thus be seen as managing conversational implicature in such various ways as cancellation, indeterminacy. The study has two purposes: the first is to demonstrate the semantic properties embodied in hedges, the second, which is of greater importance, is to approach hedges as a pragmatic concept from several angles: a. threat minimizing strategies used to signal distance and to avoid absolute statements, b. strategies to accurately reflect the certainty of knowledge and c. hedging as a textual device, d. syntactical property of hedges and e. politeness strategies in the social interactions. It is the latter motivation that urges the author to make a probe into many hedges with prototypical properties mainly within interactive context. A conventionalized usage of hedging is also given space to be illustrated.