Hedging

When words of this frame are used as hedge markers, they signal that the speaker of the sentence wishes to be careful about asserting some Hedged_content. Use of a hedge marker may mean that the speaker is uncertain of how factual of the Hedged_content is, or uncertain of whether they're expressing the idea behind Hedged_content well, or it may mean that the Hedged_content is socially undesirable or awkward in the conversational context. The president is a bit of an idiot when it comes to foreign policy . I 'm sorry , but he is on the heavy side , you understand . I thought, like, maybe you would know . My father was something of a dilettante . He rather doubts you'll be able to convince your mom. Because these words serve to indicate hesitancy, often for purposes of increased politeness, speakers may use several encodings of hedging simultaneously to iconically indicate the degree of politeness or hesitancy that they wish to express: Your story, is, like, kind of a bit on the short side . There is also an ironic or sarcastic use of LUs in this frame, as in the following: When a standard vaccuum can't even pick up the clods, you know you've kinda got a problem. Words expressing small quantities or degrees (e.g., "a tad", "a little", etc.) can be used in a very similar function to words of this frame. However, these words do not simply signify hesitation, but merely frequently imply it when used to modify a predication. Such words can only be used on their on or with a noun to signify a small quantity or number ("a little whiskey", see Proportional_quantity), or with an adjective to indicate that the quality described by the adjective is close to average ("a mite stupid", "somewhat confused" see Degree). Words of those frames may be nested within noun phrases or in other positions where content is not asserted but rather presupposed. Words that belong to the Hedging frame, by contrast, either take a noun complement and indicate hesitancy or imprecision concerning the category ("something of a klutz"), or modify an entire proposition to indicate imprecision of the proposition ("I, like, waved it around"). In both cases, the Hedged_content must occur in the at-issue focus of a proposition, the part of a statement that the speaker is, so to speak, on record as asserting.