Awareness in Action by Andrzej Łyda & Konrad Szcześniak

Author:Andrzej Łyda & Konrad Szcześniak
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

2 Literature Review

2.1 Hedging

The notion of ‘hedge’ has been defined in many different ways (Lakoff 1972; Markkanen and Schröder 1997; Channell 1994) as it has expanded from a linguistic term to a concept with communicative, interactional and pragmatic connotations. The term was coined by Lakoff (1972, p. 195), where it was used to refer to the semantic concept denoting “words or phrases whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy.” Within the domain of pragmatics, hedges have over the time become words or phrases that mitigate the force of an utterance and in this way act as face-saving devices (Brown and Levinson 1987; Markannen and Schröder 1997).

Traditionally hedges have been viewed as empty fillers that should be avoided at all costs (Fox Tree 2007). O’Donnell and Todd (1991, p. 69) refer to you see, you know, I mean as “phrases which occur with varying frequency in informal speech, or with unskillful speakers.” Language users also seem to have negative perceptions about hedging because it shows uncertainty that is perceived as an indicator of unreliability. On the other hand, native speakers very often regard non-native speakers as rude or too direct because they do not hedge (Nugroho 2002, p. 17).

Spoken corpora (e.g. MICASE; CANCODE) reveal that hedges are pervasive in native speaker spoken discourse and perform important pragmatic functions. They act as softeners, conversational cooperative devices and politeness strategies (Nugroho 2002). Although hedging devices play a prominent role in spoken discourse, they are undervalued in the teaching context. As a result, non-native speakers’ use of hedging devices differs significantly from that of native-speakers (Nikula 1997). Channell (1994, p. 21) observes that “it is often noticed by teachers that English of advanced students, while grammatically, phonologically, and lexically correct, may sound rather bookish and pedantic to a native speaker. This results in part from an inability to include appropriate vague expressions.”

Despite the importance of hedges for effective communication, surprisingly little research has been done on the acquisition of these devices by foreign language learners.

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