New approaches to hedging / / edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, Stefan Schneider ; contributors, Gisle Andersen [and thirteen others].

• Superior document: Studies in Pragmatics,
• TeilnehmendeR: Kaltenböck, Gunther,; Mihatsch, Wiltrud,; Schneider, Stefan,; Andersen, Gisle,
• Place / Publishing House: Bingley, England : : Emerald,, 2010.; ©2010
• Year of Publication: 2010
• Edition: First edition.
• Language: English
• Series: Studies in pragmatics.
• Physical Description: 1 online resource (324 p.)
• Notes: Includes index.
• Other title: Preliminary Material /; Introduction /; Pragmatic Competence: The Case of Hedging /; A Contrastive Approach to Vague Nouns /; Hedges in Context: Form and Function of Sort of and Kind of /; Mitigating and Being Vague in Interpreter-Mediated Discourse /; The Diachrony of Rounders and Adaptors: Approximation and Unidirectional Change /; Hyperbolic Approximative Numerals in Cross-Cultural Comparison /; Approximative Expressions and their Loose Uses in Chinese /; Weakening or Strengthening?: A Case of Enantiosemy in Plato’s Gorgias /; Position and Scope of Epistemic Phrases in Planned and Unplanned American English /; Pragmatic Functions of Parenthetical I Think /; Parenthetical Hedged Performatives /; On the Relationship between Attenuation, Discourse Particles and Position /; Subject Index /
• Bibliography: Includes bibliographical references and index.
• ISBN: 9004253246
• ISSN: 1750-368X
• Hierarchical level: Monograph
• Statement of Responsibility: edited by Gunther Kaltenböck, Wiltrud Mihatsch, Stefan Schneider ; contributors, Gisle Andersen [and thirteen others].

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.