Pragmatics behind the Usage of Hedges a bit (of) and somewhat in British Interpersonal Communication

Abstract

This article considers the pragmatics behind the usage of hedges a bit (of) and somewhat. There is no common agreed-upon understanding concerning their categorisation as the ambiguous nature of any vagueness marker makes an utterance more open to the negotiation of meaning, whereas multiple approaches applied to the investigation result in an abundance of incompatible characteristics of the above-mentioned hedges. The phenomenon of hedging is quite often analysed with reference to isolated hedged speech acts which only reveal explicit pragmatic information, whereas recent research focuses on hedges in academic writing, political, and media discourse. Therefore, it makes sense to explore hedges individually taking into account situational parameters. With this aim in mind, verbal exchanges including hedges a bit (of) and somewhat have been chosen from the dialogue corpus containing examples of interpersonal communication. Socio- and pragmalinguistic methods, conversational analysis as well as quantitative procedures and comparison are used to conduct this research. The results have been verified by addressees by means of metacommunicative commentary, since hedging strategies make utterances vague and suggest alternative interpretations, which is why it is essential that the speaker’s purpose of communication be clarified. Such a combination of methods in analysing the most typical hedged speech acts uncovers explicit and implicit information the speaker was trying to communicate. Both hedges a bit (of) and somewhat are used as mitigators to avoid a face threat for both interlocutors and realise the communicative strategy of politeness. Hedge a bit (of) is often a part of conventional speech formula, as well as means to express irony or imply the vagueness of the addressee’s intentions. Hedge somewhat can also be used as a conversation filler to avoid communication failure.

Keywords

• хедж
• a bit (of)
• somewhat
• межличностная коммуникация
• прагматическая функция
• теория вежливости
• стратегия смягчения
• английская лингвокультура