In a reanalysis of women's language, Holmes (1995) has argued that women's use of hedges expresses interpersonal warmth and not, as many researchers have maintained, linguistic tentativeness. It is typically men, she suggests, who employ hedges to convey imprecision and incertitude. In this study, we investigated the use of the hedges sort of and you know in a sample of South African students. ...

This study analyzes the types and frequencies of hedges and intensifiers employed in NS and NNS academic essays included in a corpus of L1 and L2 student academic texts (745 essays/220,747 words). The overarching goal of this investigation is to focus on these lexical and syntactic features of written discourse because they effectively lend themselves to instruction in L2 academic writing cours...

We show a complete axiomatization of unary connectives interpreted by monotone and superdiagonal truth functions, so-called truth-depressing hedges. These connectives formalize linguistic hedges like “slightly true” and “more or less”. We follow ideas of [11] and show that BLvt-logic can be enriched by a unary connective for which we can establish strong completeness with respect to the desired...

OBJECTIVES To determine the potential impact of point of sale advertising on adolescents so as to inform changes to the Tobacco Control Act. DESIGN Participants were randomly assigned to one of two conditions. In the control condition, students were exposed to a photograph of a packet of cigarettes; in the intervention condition, students were exposed to an ad for cigarettes, typical of point...

To win the attention of the audience, presidential candidates rely on their own rhetorical methods. Hedges and boosters as metadiscourse markers have been the focus of many studies as the communicative strategies enabling speakers to soften the force of utterances or moderate their assertive force. TV news was used as the corpus of this study, whereas most of the previous studies have focused o...