Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts

Abstract

Logicians have, by and large, engaged in the convenient fiction that sentences of natural languages (at least declarative sentences) are either true or false or, at worst, lack a truth value, or have a third value often interpreted as 'nonsense'. And most contemporary linguists who have thought seriously about semantics, especially formal semantics, have largely shared this fiction, primarily for lack of a sensible alternative. Yet students of language, especially psychologists and linguistic philosophers, have long been attuned to the fact that natural language concepts have vague boundaries and fuzzy edges and that, consequently, natural language sentences will very often be neither true, nor false, nor nonsensical, but rather true to a certain extent and false to a certain extent, true in certain respects and false in other respects. It is common for logicians to give truth conditions for predicates in terms of classical set theory. 'John is tall' (or 'TALL(j)') is defined to be true just in case the individual denoted by 'John' (or 'j') is in the set of tall men. Putting aside the problem that tallness is really a relative concept (tallness for a pygmy and tallness for a basketball player are obviously different) 1, suppose we fix a population relative to which we want to define tallness. In contemporary America, how tall do you have to be to be tall? 5'8"? 5'9"? 5'10"? 5'11"? 6'? 6'2"? Obviously there is no single fixed answer. How old do you have to be to be middle-aged? 35? 37? 39? 40? 42? 45? 50? Again the concept is fuzzy. Clearly any attempt to limit truth conditions for natural language sentences to true, false and "nonsense' will distort the natural language concepts by portraying them as having sharply defined rather than fuzzily defined boundaries. Work dealing with such questions has been done in psychology. To take a recent example, Eleanor Rosch Heider (1971) took up the question of whether people perceive category membership as a clearcut issue or a matter of degree. For example, do people think of members of a given

Academic textbooks on ADHD genetics: balanced or biased?

“…Viewed positively, hedging is a means to project “honesty, modesty and proper caution” (Swales, 1990, p. 175). Other scholars are less positive and regard hedges as phrases or words “whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy” (Lakoff, 1973, p. 471). Regardless of a positive or critical view on hedging, when there is not much space for an elaborate discussion authors understandably need to simplify.…”

Hedging nos textos acadêmicos escritos por alunos chineses em chinês, inglês e português

“…CHANNELL, 1994;CUTTING, 2007;ZHANG, 2004), pragmática interacional (ex. JUCKER et al 2003KÄRKKÄINEN, 2003;FETZER, 2011), entre outras. Entretanto, ainda não foi encontrada nenhuma pesquisa que estude o fenômeno no contexto de multilinguismo, comparando as estratégias de hedging produzidas em três línguas, por falantes da mesma língua materna.…”

Euphemism, Hedging or Mystification of Responsibility? An Investigation into Contemporary Colloquial Discourse with Particular Reference to Taxi Drivers & Undergraduate University Students in Egypt & Jordan

“…The term was first introduced into the realm of linguistics by Lakoff (1973) in "Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts". He states that "some of the most interesting questions are raised by the study of words whose meaning implicitly involves fuzziness -words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy.…”