Understatements and Hedges in English

• Preface | p. ix
• 0. Introduction | p. 1
• 1. Guidelines to Understatements and Hedges | p. 9
• 1.1. The sentence and its negatability
• 1.2. Liability constraints of the sentence
• 1.3. Working definition and working perspective
• 2. Phrastic Indetermination as a Device for Forming Understatements | p. 27
• 2.1. Negation of predicates
• 2.2. Detensification of predicates by grading adverbs
• 3. Neustic Indetermination as a Device for Forming Hedges | p. 97
• 3.1. Factivity and modality
• 3.2. Questions
• 3.3. Modalized assertory assertions
• 3.4. Summary
• 4. Communicative Conditions for Understatements and Hedges | p. 155
• 4.1. Another look at negatability of sentences
• 4.2. Communication as a possible threat to face
• 4.3. Understatements and hedges as face saving strategies
• 4.4. Face threatening acts and face saving strategies exemplified by praise and criticism
• 4.5. Summary
• Footnotes | p. 171

Cited by 94 other publications

Alghazo, Sharif, Khulood Al-Anbar, Ghaleb Rabab’ah, Nimer Abusalim & Mohammad Rayyan

2024. The construction of stance in English and Arabic newspaper editorials: a case study. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications 11:1

Brambilla, Emanuele

2024. Chapter 6. Argumentative style in international adoption dossiers. In Persuasion in Specialized Discourse [Argumentation in Context, 22], ► pp. 134 ff.

Claridge, Claudia

2024. Researching understatement in the history of English. In Unlocking the History of English [Current Issues in Linguistic Theory, 364], ► pp. 10 ff.

Iqbal, Rai Hassan & Muhammad Shaharyar Sabiri

2024. A Corpus-Based Study of Adverbial Hedges in Pakistani English Newspaper Editorials. VFAST Transactions on Education and Social Sciences 12:1 ► pp. 09 ff.

Lo Baido, Maria Cristina

2024. Chapter 8. Vagueness explored. In Vagueness, Ambiguity, and All the Rest [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 347], ► pp. 177 ff.

Quintana Toledo, Elena

2024. The approximators about, at least and nearly as interpersonal devices in nineteenth-century women’s instructive texts. Revista de Lingüística y Lenguas Aplicadas 19 ► pp. 164 ff.

Al-Mutairi, Naif Barakah & Mohammad Mahzari

2023. Advice-seeking and advice-giving in Arabic computer-mediated communication in the medical context. Frontiers in Psychology 14

Jameel, Prof. Abdulkarim Fadhil

2023. A Pragmatic Study of Hedging in Academic Discourse. INTERNATIONAL JOURNAL OF RESEARCH IN SOCIAL SCIENCES AND HUMANITIES 13:1 ► pp. 674 ff.

Lian, Olaug S., Sarah Nettleton, Huw Grange & Christopher Dowrick

2023. ‘It feels like my metabolism has shut down’. Negotiating interactional roles and epistemic positions in a primary care consultation. Health Expectations 26:1 ► pp. 366 ff.

Tkacheva, Julia Gennadievna

2023. Themed collection of papers from Foreign International Scientific Conference « Science in the Era of Challenges and Global Changes» Ьу НNRI «National development» in cooperation with AFP (Puerto Cabezas, Nicaragua). Мау 2023. - Caracas (Venezuela), ► pp. 97 ff.

Viktorova, E. Yu.

2023. Pragmatic Syncretism in the Use of Hedges (Based on Russian Thesis Reviews). Discourse 9:4 ► pp. 127 ff.

Vine, Bernadette & Janet Holmes

2023. Doing leadership in style: Pragmatic markers in New Zealand workplace interaction. Intercultural Pragmatics 20:1 ► pp. 1 ff.

Boginskaya, Olga A.

2022. Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts. Russian Journal of Linguistics 26:3 ► pp. 645 ff.

Boginskaya, Olga A.

2023. Russian lexical and syntactic hedges in dissertation reviews. Russian Language Studies 21:1 ► pp. 18 ff.

Malmström, Hans

2022. Preaching in uncertain terms. Functions of Language ► pp. 332 ff.

Nikolić, Melina & Maja Nikolić

2022. Multiple hedging in the political interview. Reci Beograd 14:15 ► pp. 24 ff.

Claridge, Claudia, Ewa Jonsson & Merja Kytö

2021. A Little Something Goes a Long Way: Little in the Old Bailey Corpus. Journal of English Linguistics 49:1 ► pp. 61 ff.

de Pablos-Ortega, Carlos

2021. “Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?”. In Police Interviews [Benjamins Current Topics, 118], ► pp. 51 ff.

Pablos-Ortega, Carlos de

2019. “Would it be fair to say that you actively sought out material?”. Pragmatics and Society 10:1 ► pp. 49 ff.

Johansen, Stine Hulleberg

2021. “I guess anyone would do that wouldn’t they?”. Languages in Contrast 21:2 ► pp. 163 ff.

Avkhacheva, Irina, Irina Barinova & Natalia Nesterova

2020. On Hedging in Teaching Academic Writing. In Integrating Engineering Education and Humanities for Global Intercultural Perspectives [Lecture Notes in Networks and Systems, 131], ► pp. 494 ff.

Barchas‐Lichtenstein, Jena & Alexandra D'Arcy

2020. Hedge Words. In The International Encyclopedia of Linguistic Anthropology, ► pp. 1 ff.

Bernaisch, Tobias

2020. Hedges and Gender in the Inner and Expanding Circle. In Gender in World Englishes, ► pp. 94 ff.

Farese, Gian Marco

2020. The Ethnopragmatics of English Understatement and Italian Exaggeration: Clashing Cultural Scripts for the Expression of Personal Opinions. In Studies in Ethnopragmatics, Cultural Semantics, and Intercultural Communication, ► pp. 59 ff.

Hassan, Ali Sabah & Nadya Khairy Muhamed Said

2020. A PRAGMATIC STUDY OF HEDGES IN AMERICAN POLITICAL EDITORIALS. International Journal of Research in Social Sciences and Humanities 10:3 ► pp. 60 ff.

Lampert, Gunther

2020. Chapter 5. How and why seem became an evidential. In Re-Assessing Modalising Expressions [Studies in Language Companion Series, 216], ► pp. 109 ff.

Garcia, Angela Cora

2019. How Mediation Works,

Gribanova, T. I.

2019. HEDGING IN DIFFERENT TYPES OF DISCOURSE. Issues of Applied Linguistics ► pp. 7 ff.

Parvaresh, Vahid & Sayyed Amir Sheikhan

2019. Pragmatic functions of ‘sort of’ in Persian. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 29:1 ► pp. 86 ff.

Sabet, Peyman G. P.

2019. On the functions of sort of in New Zealand TV programs. Journal of Asian Pacific Communication 29:1 ► pp. 33 ff.

刘, 昂

2019. Empirical Study on Hedges in the Abstracts of Articles in Computer Science between China and America. Modern Linguistics 07:06 ► pp. 983 ff.

Dolgova Jacobsen, Natalia

2018. Chapter 11. The use of hedging devices in L2 legal writing. In Language Learning, Discourse and Cognition [Human Cognitive Processing, 64], ► pp. 275 ff.

Klimczak, Karol Marek & Marta Dynel

2018. Evaluation Markers and Mitigators in Analyst Reports in Light of Market Response to Stock Recommendations. International Journal of Business Communication 55:3 ► pp. 310 ff.

Ehsan Namaziandost & Sajad Shafiee

2018. Gender Differences in the Use of Lexical Hedges in Academic Spoken Language among Iranian EFL Learners: A Comparative Study. International Journal of Research in English Education 3:4 ► pp. 63 ff.

Spinolo, Nicoletta

2018. Studying Figurative Language in Simultaneous Interpreting: The IMITES (Interpretación de la Metáfora Entre ITaliano y ESpañol) Corpus. In Making Way in Corpus-based Interpreting Studies [New Frontiers in Translation Studies, ], ► pp. 133 ff.

Webb, Joseph C., Alison Pilnick & Jennifer Clegg

2018. Imagined Constructed Thought: How Staff Interpret the Behavior of Patients with Intellectual Disabilities. Research on Language and Social Interaction 51:4 ► pp. 347 ff.

Yeomans, Michael, Brandon M. Stewart, Kimia Mavon, Alex Kindel, Dustin Tingley & Justin Reich

2018. The Civic Mission of MOOCs: Engagement across Political Differences in Online Forums. International Journal of Artificial Intelligence in Education 28:4 ► pp. 553 ff.

Adamczyk, Magdalena

2017. Chapter 13. On the pragmatic expansion of Polish gdzieś tam ‘somewhere (there)/about’. In Pragmatic Markers, Discourse Markers and Modal Particles [Studies in Language Companion Series, 186], ► pp. 369 ff.

Adamczyk, Magdalena

2022. Do hedges always hedge?. Pragmatics. Quarterly Publication of the International Pragmatics Association (IPrA) ► pp. 321 ff.

Cheatham, Gregory A. & Sylvia Nyegenye

2017. Linguistic Differences with Bilingual Parents Who are Immigrants: Words for Dialoguing About Young Children. Early Childhood Education Journal 45:5 ► pp. 685 ff.

Llopis, María Ángeles Orts

2017. Terror at Home On the Rhetoric of Domestic Violence Legislation in the United Kingdom and Spain. Journal of Intercultural Communication 17:2 ► pp. 1 ff.

Waters, Sophia

2017. Chapter 2. Nice as a cultural keyword. In Cultural Keywords in Discourse [Pragmatics & Beyond New Series, 277], ► pp. 25 ff.

Xie, Chaoqun & Bingyun Li

2017. McCready, Eric. 2015. Reliability in Pragmatics . Studies in Language 41:3 ► pp. 800 ff.

Neuhaus, Laura

2016. On the relation of irony, understatement, and litotes. Pragmatics & Cognition 23:1 ► pp. 117 ff.

Neuhaus, Laura

2023. Irony and Its Overlap with Hyperbole and Understatement. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 310 ff.

Birzer, Sandra

2015. Generally speaking, connectivity and conversation management combined: the functions of Russian voobšče govorja and Polish ogólnie mówiąc. Russian Linguistics 39:1 ► pp. 81 ff.

Bordet, Lucile & Denis Jamet

2015. Degré et intensification : essai de typologie. Anglophonia :20

Nobarany, Syavash & Kellogg S. Booth

2015. Use of politeness strategies in signed open peer review. Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology 66:5 ► pp. 1048 ff.

Diani, Giuliana

2014. Politeness. In Corpus Pragmatics, ► pp. 169 ff.

Dynel, Marta & Karol Marek Klimczak

2014. Evaluation and Certainty in Analyst Reports: A Linguistic Analysis in the Polish Language. SSRN Electronic Journal

Plastina, Anna Franca & Fabrizia Del Vecchio

2014. Diagnostic news delivery. In Communicating Certainty and Uncertainty in Medical, Supportive and Scientific Contexts [Dialogue Studies, 25], ► pp. 183 ff.

Ponterotto, Diane

2014. The risks of uncertainty. Language and Dialogue 4:1 ► pp. 93 ff.

Ponterotto, Diane

2018. Hedging in political interviewing. Pragmatics and Society 9:2 ► pp. 175 ff.

Ivanova, V. G.

2013. LINGUISTIC ASPECTS OF UNDERSTATEMENT IN MODERN ENGLISH. MGIMO Review of International Relations :5(32) ► pp. 252 ff.

Knight, Dawn, Svenja Adolphs & Ronald Carter

2013. Formality in Digital Discourse: A Study of Hedging in CANELC. In Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics 2013 [Yearbook of Corpus Linguistics and Pragmatics, 1], ► pp. 131 ff.

Rymar, Ye. F.

2013. Style of Mass Communication, Media Text in the Internet and the Implementation of Concept “Savaş” in it. The Oriental Studies 2013:61 ► pp. 139 ff.

Malášková, Martina

2012. Hedges as writer protective devices in applied linguistics and literary criticism research articles. Discourse and Interaction 5:1 ► pp. 31 ff.

Mihatsch, Wiltrud

2012. Hedges. In The Encyclopedia of Applied Linguistics,

Łyda, Andrzej & Krystyna Warchał

2011. Ethnic and Disciplinary Cultures and Understatement: Litotic Constructions in Polish and English Linguistics and Biology Research Articles. In Aspects of Culture in Second Language Acquisition and Foreign Language Learning, ► pp. 193 ff.

NKEMLEKE, DANIEL

2010. Cameroonian and foreign scholars’ discourse: the rhetoric of conference abstracts. World Englishes 29:2 ► pp. 173 ff.

Pupier, Paul

2009. Une première systématique des évaluatifs en français. Revue québécoise de linguistique 26:1 ► pp. 51 ff.

Clark, Colin, Priscilla Rogers, Ulrike M Murfett & Soon Ang

2008. Is Courtesy Enough? 'Solidarity' in Call Center Interactions. SSRN Electronic Journal

LEMPERT, MICHAEL

2008. The poetics of stance: Text-metricality, epistemicity, interaction. Language in Society 37:4 ► pp. 569 ff.

Cotterill, Janet

2007. ‘I Think He Was Kind of Shouting or Something’: Uses and Abuses of Vagueness in the British Courtroom. In Vague Language Explored, ► pp. 97 ff.

Ruzaitė, Jūratė

2007. Vague References to Quantities as a Face-Saving Strategy in Teacher-Student Interaction. Lodz Papers in Pragmatics 3:-1

Lewandowska-Tomaszczyk, Barbara

2006. A Cognitive-Interactional Model of Direct and Indirect Negation. In La Négation, ► pp. 379 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. Being REASONABLE. In English, ► pp. 103 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. The “Cultural Baggage” of English and Its Significance in the World at Large. In English, ► pp. 299 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. Being FAIR. In English, ► pp. 141 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. English,

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. I THINK. In English, ► pp. 204 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. The English Causatives. In English, ► pp. 171 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. English as a Cultural Universe. In English, ► pp. 3 ff.

Wierzbicka, Anna

2006. PROBABLY. In English, ► pp. 247 ff.

Link, Kristen E. & Roger J. Kreuz

2005. The Comprehension of Ostensible Speech Acts. Journal of Language and Social Psychology 24:3 ► pp. 227 ff.

PRECHT, KRISTEN

2003. Stance moods in spoken English: Evidentiality and affect in British and American conversation. Text - Interdisciplinary Journal for the Study of Discourse 23:2

Rogers, Priscilla S. & Song Mei Lee-Wong

2003. Reconceptualizing Politeness to Accommodate Dynamic Tensions in Subordinate-to-Superior Reporting. Journal of Business and Technical Communication 17:4 ► pp. 379 ff.

Mondorf, Britta

2002. Gender Differences in English Syntax. Journal of English Linguistics 30:2 ► pp. 158 ff.

Feltovich, Nick J., Rick Harbaugh & Ted To

2001. Too Cool for School? Signaling and Countersignaling. SSRN Electronic Journal

Salager‐Meyer, Françoise

2000. Debate‐creating vs. accounting references in French medical journals. Technical Communication Quarterly 9:3 ► pp. 291 ff.

Kerre, Etienne E. & Martine De Cock

1999. Linguistic Modifiers: An Overview. In Fuzzy Logic and Soft Computing [The International Series on Asian Studies in Computer and Information Science, 6], ► pp. 69 ff.

Varttala, Teppo

1999. Remarks on the Communicative Functions of Hedging in Popular Scientific and Specialist Research Articles on Medicine. English for Specific Purposes 18:2 ► pp. 177 ff.

Israel, M.

1996. Polarity sensitivity as lexical semantics. Linguistics and Philosophy 19:6 ► pp. 619 ff.

Hinkel, Eli

1994. Appropriateness of Advice as L2 Solidarity Strategy. RELC Journal 25:2 ► pp. 71 ff.

Hyland, Ken

1994. Hedging in academic writing and EAF textbooks. English for Specific Purposes 13:3 ► pp. 239 ff.

Haimowitz, Ira J.

1991. Modeling all dialogue system participants to generate empathetic responses. Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine 35:4 ► pp. 321 ff.

HAGGE, JOHN & CHARLES KOSTELNICK

1989. Linguistic Politeness in Professional Prose. Written Communication 6:3 ► pp. 312 ff.

Holmes, Janet

1988. Of course:A pragmatic particle in New Zealand women's and men's speech∗. Australian Journal of Linguistics 8:1 ► pp. 49 ff.

Holmes, Janet

1988. SORT OF IN NEW ZEALAND WOMEN'S AND MEN'S SPEECH. Studia Linguistica 42:2 ► pp. 85 ff.

Holmes, Janet

1989. Bent Preisler, Linguistic sex roles in conversation: Social variation in the expression of tentativeness in English. Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1986. Pp. xviii + 347.. Language in Society 18:2 ► pp. 293 ff.

Holmes, Janet

2021. Review of Ken (1998): Hedging in Scientific Research Articles. Australian Review of Applied Linguistics ► pp. 144 ff.

[no author supplied]

2006. Copyright Page. In English, ► pp. iv ff.

[no author supplied]

2022. Figuring out Figuration [Figurative Thought and Language, 14],

[no author supplied]

2023. Irony, Affect, and Related Figures. In The Cambridge Handbook of Irony and Thought, ► pp. 235 ff.

This list is based on CrossRef data as of 27 october 2024. Please note that it may not be complete. Sources presented here have been supplied by the respective publishers. Any errors therein should be reported to them.

Main BIC Subject

Main BISAC Subject