Lexical and grammatical hedging as the means of author’s modality

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Lexical and grammatical hedging as the means of author's modality

O.V. Hyryn

The article examines the phenomenon of linguistic hedging related to the establishment of the author's responsibility limits for the statement and the mitigation of ultimacy.

Key words: hedging, hedge, ultimacy, distancing, epistemic modality.

ЛЕКСИЧНИИ ТА ГРАМАТИЧНИЙ хеджинг як засіб вираження АВТОРСЬКОЇ МОДАЛЬНОСТІ

Гирин О.В.

У статті досліджено явище лінгвістичного хеджування, пов'язане з установленням меж відповідальності автора висловлювання та пом'якшенням категоричності.

Ключові слова: хеджинг, хедж-маркер, категоричність, дистанціювання, епістемічна модальність.

Defining the problem. Neutral, formal, both public or private, tolerant and inoffensive speech suggests that the author of both oral and written statements has to be careful in producing them. Such caution makes it possible to distinguish between facts and statements, and also "softens" the ultimacy of the opinions expressed.

This language phenomenon attracted the linguistic attention in the second part of the 20th century, however the current modern trends in public speaking and speech writing have reinforced the need to additionally study and analyze hedging [1; 3; 4] and its structural and semantic types as well as pragmatic aspects of its usage, which altogether constitute the objectives of this paper.

Previous research. The term "hedging” was borrowed from Economics. In this field, “hedging” means the insurance of possible risks, which is supposed to protect against a variety of adverse situations. In the linguistic field, the term itself has hardly changed its meaning but rather acquired additional traces of meaning. Thus in linguistics, hedging, or direct answer evasion, is a term introduced into scientific circulation by J. Lakoff in 1972 in "Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts" [2], in which he was first to define the notion. He suggested the name of the phenomenon - "hedge" [2: 21], metaphorically comparing it with a fence, i.e. by using hedges the speakers would separate themselves from the direct meaning of their message. Thus, according to J. Lakoff, "hedging is words or phrases whose function is to present things ambiguously, while individuals are completely confident in the accuracy of the information they present in the communication process or in their publications" [2: 195].

In the attempt to find the most suitable definition for the phenomenon we so far have come across two terms: “hedge” and “hedging”. In the paper we will differentiate between them posing the latter as the phenomenon name and the former - as one of its realization types.

However, J. Lakoff is not the only scholar who studied this linguistic manifestation of uncertainty or evasion; the introduction of hedging to the linguistic analysis was aligned with the "fuzzy set theory" associated with the names of L. Zadeh and W. Weinreich [9;10] who studied the similar process a decade before Lakoff. The theory, as its name suggests stands on similar to Lakoff's grounds.

Not refusing from the traditional approach we will determine that hedging is constructioning a statement in a way, presenting the message as a relative rather than absolute truth. This can be achieved by a number of means, among which there is one which we will refer to as hedges.

The aim of the study is to analyze the structural, semantic and pragmatic features of hedging.

The research object is hedging and hedging units in modern oral and written speech.

Though hedging is associated primarily with lexical semantic, the use of hedging also finds its realization on a grammatical level. Therefore the survey matter is the semantic and structural features of grammatical and lexical hedging in present-day oral and written speech.

linguistic hedging english text

Presentation of the main research material

Hedging can be used in speech for one or several of the following reasons:

1. By using hedging, speakers soften statements to reduce the risk of objection. This occurs to avoid scientific inaccuracy and defines it as a linguistic hint of bias that prevents personal liability for the statement.

2. Speakers express the fact that they do not claim the "last word” on a particular topic. Expressing a lack of confidence does not necessarily mean embarrassment or uncertainty. Hedging can also be seen as a means of expressing greater accuracy in expressing results. In fact, speakers tend to soften the force of their assertion since a stronger statement may not be justified by available evidence and data.

3. Hedging can be used as a positive or negative politeness strategy, by using which the speaker tries to pose himself more modest than arrogant or omniscient. Hedging is a rational interpersonal strategy that supports the position of the speaker, builds the relationship between the recipient and the speaker and guarantees a certain level of acceptance in the community. Once a statement becomes generally accepted, it can be submitted without hedging.

4. A certain degree of separation from the message has become a norm in speech; hedging already functions as an integral part in the sphere of public speaking in English having coined such set vague expressions as "address issues", "face challenges" etc.

Based on this information, we can conclude that the implementation of various hedging strategies by the speaker can be accounted by ignorance, silence, doubt, elimination of redundant information, diplomatic moves, ambivalence of relations or lack of interest in the subject, limited semantic resources of language or inability to use them.

The most important and indicative criteria for hedging are:

• its potential variability, i.e. the presence of lexical units and inflections in it, which can be replaced or omitted without loss of meaning;

• reduction of its accuracy and specificity, which leads to its abstractness;

• its increased objectivity or, conversely, remoteness from the information presented.

In recent years, the concept of "hedging" has been developed primarily in pragmatics and discourse analysis, so the modern meaning of this term goes beyond the formal logic and semantics of frames, penetrating the field of metacommunication and linguistic strategies of mitigation and politeness. The difficulty of functionally defining lexical delimiters (hedges) is that almost any linguistic expression can be interpreted as a "hedge". Therefore we will distinguish between hedges proper and softeners. Hedges proper are those parts of sentences, which are nonobligatory for the grammatical structure of the sentence, that is presenting additional minor information. E.g: in the sentence Maybe you're right, the sentence structure could well go without Maybe. Whereas softeners are an indispensable part of a sentence, which can be replaced though by a more “direct” option. For example, in the sentence: You need to study harder, the verb is an obligatory part, though its semantics is less imposing than of the verb "must", which is most definitely the message of the sentence.

So, pragmatically hedging is associated with the expression of confidence, or more often with a lack thereof in the provided information veracity. However the uncertainty can be either of the two following types:

• ambiguity within the propositional content;

• ambiguity in the relationship between the propositional content and the speaker, i.e. According to the above types of uncertainty, we will define two types of hedges: a) approximators - hedges that affect the true value of the propositional content, for example: Her mood was sort of dreamy;

b) buffer hedges - lexical or grammatical units that do not affect the truth of the meaning, but reflect the degree of the speaker's commitment to the meaning of the truth of the whole sentence, for example: I think her mood was dreamy.

Morphologically hedges can belong to any part of speech and function like nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs and even articles.

The most significant concept associated with hedging is modality. If we consider epistemic modality where speaker expresses his attitude to the proposition validity this will provide an opportunity to draw a parallel with many definitions of hedging.

The degree of the speaker's confidence in the message can vary from absolute confidence to complete uncertainty. Epistemic expressions are often seen as markers that mark the meaning of a sentence on the "true- false" axis. Probability being a kind of epistemic modality, is a subjective assessment of the information veracity by the speaker, based on how much he is aware of the state of affairs at the time of speech. If the speaker is not sufficiently aware of this fact (or is not categoric to state anything), he reports it as something more or less probable. In fact, what he assumes may or may not be true.

Thus the inclusion of hedging in the epistemic modality is observed by three linguistic features which we can define as:

a) proposition entry;

b) relation to illocutionary force;

c) generation of individual lexical items.

The latter is implemented by using expressions such as so-called, so to speak, etc. This connection is clearly seen in the examples of modal verbs with epistemic meanings. In a sentence like "It may be possible," we are dealing with hedging on the one hand and epistemic modality on the other.

Thus we can determine that in both written and oral discourse hedging acts as a language "insurance" and allows not only to individualize the statement, but also to establish limits of responsibility for the accuracy of information, propositions, to limit the degree of reality judgment reliability, to avoid absolute interpretation.

So, let's analyze the English lexical items belonging to the category of hedging and divide them into the following groups: set expressions that complete the list or enumeration, approximators; substitute words; performatives.

1. Set expressions that complete the list or enumeration. This group includes generalized list completers which are used at the end of the list, indicating that they can be easily extended, naming the same meaning of objects, phenomena and actions. That is, it is assumed that the addressee will easily deduce from the general context what can act as a completion (and things like that; and things; and all the rest of it; and all; and all that sort of thing; etc.; and something like that; and something of that nature; or something like that; or something; or anything; and/or stuff (like this / that), or what / where / whoever; or so; and everything; and everything (like that / else); and that kind of thing, and that (sort of thing, and so on and so forth).

2. Approximators. The veiling of negative or categorical message can be achieved with the help of approximators. Means of opposition, epistemic modality, as well as rhetorical questions reduce the ultimacy of the statement, taking into account alternative points of view. The reduction of the negative effect is also achieved through a gradual decrease in confidence in the truth of the statement, which occurs due to such units as: on the one hand; (on) the flip side (of the coin); for one thing; although; though; albeit; however; (but) along the way; despite; in spite of; nonetheless; nevertheless; still; yet; while etc. We undoubtedly can attribute to them various lexical means. Among them we can structurally distinguish two subgroups:

a) approximators containing a quantifier (We'll see you at seven or thereabouts);

b) approximators that do not contain a quantifier (The quarrel caused loads of problems). The first group, as a rule, includes adverbs of measure and degree (for example, almost, around, etc.).

To this category of approximators we also attribute units, that have postpositions -ish; - odd; -something (-Are you sure the suspect's car was green? - Well, it was greenish).

A separate attention needs to be paid to approximators, which have merely lost their obscurity meaning and are used in speech as filler words or phrases: (... you know or eh - both at the end of phrases).

3. Substitute words. This group includes lexical units that name substitutional generalized nouns or placeholders - polysemantic words that can be used to replace a meaningful specific word in a certain position in the structure of an expression. This can happen either to avoid tautology (in this case it is quite doubtful, if this is the case of hedging) or periphrasis, which can be done for euphemistic or sublime reasons.

The sentence I bought some kitchen utensils and some cleaning stuff illustrates the use of a generalized noun stuff instead of a tautological unpronounced word - possibly utensils.

In I no longer want to quarrel about the salary thingthe underlined word is euphemistic and used to substitute a contextually tabooed word which might involve emotional burden (problem, increase, decrease etc). A word can be tabooed either permanently (death, sex, killetc.) or made so by the social and emotional background of the interlocutors (money, extra weight, love, etc.)

Sentence I need a thing for unscrewing the tap illustrates the use of a generalized thing instead of the name of the tool, which the speaker might not know the name of, and not willing to make the ignorance obvious, thus tries to sublime (raise) him/herself in the eyes of the listener or at least trying not to lose the positions.

It must be noted that the substitution can be made with just one word, as well as with an infinite number of words, thus producing new lexical units, which remind the units from polysynthetic languages (He-who- shall-not-be-named, you-know-who, for whom it may concern etc.).

4. Performatives

Performative verbs in linguistic study take position between lexicaland grammatical

semantics. Therefore its manifestation in hedging structures can be attributed to both lexical and grammatical means. These structures can be:

• parenthetic (I imply, that; we mean; they suggest etc.) where the use of a performative verb removes from the speaker any responsibility for the statement;

• modal, in which the meaning of necessity is softened by other hedges really, surely, definitely, for example: It should be really stressed..., it should be surely noted....

Considering the performative hedging it must be noted that such units have certain pragmatic and semantic features, namely they are devoid of evaluative semantics. By using a performative, the speaker is doing an action, and not describing it.

Grammatical hedging includes a variety of means, both morphological and syntactic as well as those which utilize both grammatical and lexical semantics.

The main types of grammatical hedging is illustrated in Table 1.

Table 1