6 the text as well as the persuasiveness of the ideas” Šeškauskien, 2008. It also relates
to what Gillet, Hammond, Martala 2009 state in their book, ‘Inside Track to
Successful Academic Writing’ that “academic writing often calls for a cautious style, and there are various ways in which caution can be expressed” p.206. Showing
caution according to them, can be done through the use of hedges.
1.3 Taxonomy of Hedges
Hedges was first introduced by George Lakoff 1973, p.471, who defined h
edges as “words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy”. Following his research, many scholars have attempted to explore and ascertain more about the
application of hedges. They developed Lakoff’s idea based on their understanding. This
what pro bably leads Crompton 1997 to premise that hedging cannot “be pinned down
and labelled as a closed set of lexical items” because “to count all uses of certain linguistic tokens as hedges is to run the risk of misinterpreting the discourse” pp.279-
281. Thus, until this present time there are no fixed types or model of classification of hedges and the following models and some other models from other scholars can be
considered as references to understand hedging better. Hyland 1994, the most known scholar in study of Hedging classified the following lexical items, as hedges: 1 Modal
auxiliary verbs;2 Adjectival, adverbial and nominal modal of expression; 3 Modal lexical verbs; 4 If clauses; 5 question forms; 5 Passivisation; 6 Impersonal
phrases and 7 Time reference. Another prominent taxonomy of hedges is suggested by E. F. Prince 1982 and
his fellows as cited in Hua, 2011. They classified hedging into two groups, which are
Approximators and Shields.
7
Approximators Adaptors
sort of, kind of somewhat, really, almost, quiet, entirely, a little bit, to some extent,
more or less Rounders
Approximately, essentially,
about, something between..and.., roughly
Shields Plausibility Shields Think, guess, believe, afraid, assume,
suppose , seem, as far as I’m concerned
Attribution Shields someone suggests that ; it is reported that
Approximators refers to “expressions which call change to the original meaning”. They
“express the degree of correctness”. Rounders “indicates the inexact preciseness of
terms
” p.563. Another one, shields “indicates that speakers are not fully committed
to the validity of the
proposition they are conveying” p.563. Plausibility shields
shows
“speakers’ own attitude towards a proposition.” Attribution Shields shows “the
degree of uncertainty towards a proposition to another party” Hua, 2011, pp 563 -564
As what I have mentioned earlier, Crompton 1997 proposes that there can be no fix lexical items to be called as hedges, each scholars
’ view differs from each other. So you can see that Hyland excludes approximators in his model.
‘Approximators’ as hedging however is considered by Crompton 1997 as
“a class of words which most obviously seems to meet G.Lakoff’s original definition”p.281 “words whose job is to
make things fuzzier or less fuzzy ” Lakoff, 1973, p.471. The various taxonomies make
it difficult for the researcher to classify the data, since it has to be done twice according to the two taxonomies. Both taxonomies basically share similar idea and balance each
