There is general consensus today that HEDGING is a rhetorical master plan, by which a speech-maker, utilizing a linguistic device, can demonstrate a lack of responsibility to either the full semantic membership of an utterances (PROPOSITIONAL HEDGING),
(18) a) He’s really like a geek.
b) The pool has sort of a L-shaped design.
c) Peter’s house is almost 100 feet wide. or the full responsibility for the force of the speech act being expressed (SPEECH ACT HEDGING),
(19) a) Come over here, can you?
b) I guess I should leave now.
c) That type of comment isn’t made around here. [Agentless passive]
d) Perhaps you would sit down a minute.
The idea of REINFORCEMENT, initially regarded as a part of hedging, has pretty much been rejected. Thus, sentences such as…show more content… b) He is extremely tall. are not generally considered today as examples of hedging but rather of reinforcement. It is believed that the reason for this limitation of the concept has its origins in the fact that the sense of hedging on the positive side of a notion (be it to include a proposition or a speech act) seems to be contrary to intuitive expectations: hedging is simply not an equal notion, and it does not imply
