English to Spanish Other Linguistics

“Hedging” has been defined differently by linguists. As we have seen in chapter 7,
Brown and Levinson (1978: 150) define a hedge as “a particle, word, or phrase in a
set; it says of that membership that it is partial, or true only in certain respects.”⁴
Lakoff (1975: 66), who has analyzed hedging as a feature of women’s speech, finds
that hedges “leave the addressee the option of deciding how seriously to take what
the speaker is saying. It is for this reason that “John is sorta short” may be in the
right context, a polite way of saying “John is short,” rather than a scaled-down com-
ment on John’s actual height.”

The reason why hedging is so important in the courtroom is that it can be used
by witnesses to mitigate, or soften the impact of, the point they are making. Danet
(1980: 525), analyzing the question/answer sequences of the Watergate hearings,
finds:

It is obviously in the interest of defendants to mitigate the illocutionary
force or point of damaging assertions (“I guess I killed her”) but to avoid
mitigating neutral or positive assertions (“I didn’t do it” rather than “I guess
I didn’t do it”). “I guess” is a kind of hedge (Lakoff 1970). John Erlichman’s
testimony during the Watergate hearings was full of hedges on potentially
damaging admissions.