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The care and maintenance of hedges

Article  in  ELT Journal · January 1988

DOI: 10.1093/elt/42.1.37 · Source: OAI

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The care and maintenance of
hedges
John Skelton

The notion of ‘hedging’ dates back to Lakoff (1972), but its nature and its
consequences for English Language Teaching are not well understood.
This article offers a description of the term and of some of its difficulties,
andsuggests a distinction between ‘proposition’ and ‘comment’ as a clarifi-
cation of some of the problems. It then outlines some of the ways in which
an understanding of commentative language are important in the ELT
classroom, andsuggests ways in which this understanding can be fostered.

It is a feature of a great deal of the kind of language use characterized as

‘poor’ that it is in some sense unsubtle: a general and rather evanescent
phenomenon which affects users of all sorts, native or foreign language
learners, educationally sophisticated or not. The particular examples I
discuss are most relevant, I think, to those concerned with the education of
students of secondary-level ability and upwards, but the general angle of
approach might be of interest to colleagues across a wide range. And the
specific distinction I worry at is, in my view, a crucial insight for the way
human beings use language to mediate between themselves and the world.
The term ‘hedging’, which I have borrowed for my title, dates back to G.
Lakoff ( 1972), who spoke of ‘words whose job is to make things fuzzy or less
fuzzy’. He gives, as an example of what he means, the way we might talk
about birds. Eagles, for instance, are birds; so are capercailles, kingfishers,
albatrosses - but what about, for instance, a chicken? Well, suggests
Lakoff, we might find ourselves saying:

A chicken is a sort of bird.

That ‘sort of is a hedge.

There are a very large number of ways in which one can hedge in English.
Among them, for instance, are the use of impersonal phrases, the modal
system, verbs like ‘seem’, ‘look’, and ‘appear’, sentence-introductory phra-
ses like ‘I think’, ‘I believe’, and the addition of -ish to certain (but not all)
adjectives, in sentences like those following below on the right, with the
‘unhedged version’ on the left:

The world is flat. It is said that the world is flat.

God is good.
Frank Bruno is unstoppable.
David Gower has a forceful
personality.
Sarah Ferguson has red hair.
God may be good.
Frank Bruno may be unstoppable.
I doubt if David Gower has a
forceful personality.
Sarah Ferguson has reddish hair.

ELT Journal Volume 42/1 January 1988 © Oxford University Press 1988 37

articles welcome
There are, of course, many other possibilities (Rounds 1982), and it is
presumably possible to hedge in all natural languages.
In what follows, however, I argue that the considerable functional
significance of hedges has not been appreciated. It is by means of the
hedging system of a language that a user distinguishes between what s/he
says and what s/he thinks about what s/he says. Without hedging, the
world is purely propositional, a rigid (and rather dull) place where things
either are the case or are not. With a hedging system, language is rendered
more flexible and the world more subtle. Indeed, it is impossible to avoid
hedging, yet describe or discuss the world: the reader is invited to try and
debate a controversial subject without recourse to the system. It is a pity,
therefore, that the word ‘hedging’ itself, with the pejorative connotations of
its ordinary language use, has been adopted. Strangely, one interesting
attempt to refine the basic notion (Prince et al. 1982) suffers from the same
bias in its labelling. Prince and her colleagues divide ‘hedges’ into two sorts:
‘shields’ and ‘approximators’. (G. Lakoff, they point out, dealt only with
the latter: R. Lakoff (also 1972) with the former.) In shields, they suggest,
the speaker is hedged: his or her degree of commitment to a proposition is
stated. In approximators, the proposition itself is hedged: the extent to which
it is true is stated. Thus as an instance of shields one might have:
I suspect the moon is not made of green cheese after all.
And, as an instance of an approximator:
It’s made of some sort of rock stuff
Prince et al. (and subsequently, Rounds) make further subdivisions, which
I shall not discuss here. Their data are taken from Physician-Physician
discourse in a large pediatric intensive-care unit and they claim the figure of
more than one hedge every fifteen seconds. Typical of their data are the
following, which are approximators of a particular type:
9a He also has a somewhat low interior larynx (A.I.099)
b Q What about his ears? Is he still draining serosanguineous fluid?
c A Uh: it’s more just sort of crusted than . , , uh not . . . draining
(A.11.081)
There are two things one might say about this. Firstly, that the distinction
between shield and approximator seems to be sustainable only in the
abstract: it looks more like a description of a property of text sentences than
of language use. It is, for instance, easy to agree that in the invented
sentences above, what I give as an approximator (‘It’s made of something
like rock’) could also be a shield, with the phrase ‘I suspect’ carried over
from the previous sentence. Shields, in other words, appear to have an
indefinitely large potential domain, and certainly one that can comfortably
extend over more than one sentence.
Secondly, to return to an earlier point, the pejorative terminology which
the subject attracts is unfortunate. Language without hedging is language
without life. But the word carries unwelcome connotations which Rounds is
at pains to dispel. Prince et al., on the other hand, speak of ‘the remarkably
high degree of uncertainty’ evinced by the physicians whom they
recorded - as if uncertainty were necessarily a bad thing - and suggest this
as a possible cause of the ‘emotional difficulties’ they claim to observe. Such
a point of view obscures both the inevitability and value of hedging. One
would have thought, for instance, that if the physicians concerned in the

John Sk&on

articles welcome
Prince experiment were truly upset about their own uncertainty, there was
a clear training need: to teach the doctors to be confidently uncertain - that
is, to be precise about how precise it was possible for them to be, and to be
imprecise without fear.
Imprecision, that is to say, is permissible; not only that, it is generally
appropriate. It is a feature of language use that, depending on situation, a
pragmatic agreement exists about the level of exactness which is appropri-
ate. This is most clearly seen in areas of potential measurement: there is a
world of difference between the occasions when one might say, ‘It got a bit
hot this afternoon’ and ‘At 12.15 p.m. a temperature of 33.2 (correct to one
decimal place) was noted’, but to describe one as either better or more
certain than the other is facile. The simplest answer is to abandon the
terminology and return to such less idiosyncratic distinctions as that
between proposition and qualification (Skelton 1983) or, as I shall do in this
article, between proposition and comment: and it is the role of the comment to
modulate. This I hope captures what is crucial about ‘hedges’: they are a
resource, not a problem.
Language users, even in the technical domain, enter into what might be
callled a contract of inexactitude. The exact contrast struck differs along a great
many obvious parameters; one that is particularly interesting being the
distinction between the hard sciences, social sciences, and humanities. The
relative profusion of figures in the hard sciences and their absence in the
humanities is one evidence of the different contract operating in the dif-
ferent circumstances. A table of figures in a physics paper is, in a sense, a
‘hedge’ tightened up and removed to the realm of certainty. Of course, the
difference runs much deeper than that. This opening paragraph from a
physics paper (Bradley 1976) is highly propositional and therefore factual
and impersonal; it contains few comments, and only one of note, that
‘probably’ in the final sentence, for which in fact it is not certain whether
the author or Snavely are assigned responsibility.

Inertial confinement for fusion (Nuckolls et al. 1973) requires visible or

near ultraviolet lasers at high peak power for optical coupling of the
radiation to the pellet plasma (Nuckolls 1973). A lower wavelength
bound is set by two-photon absorption in the laser and optical elements
(Penzkofer and Kaiser 1972). Uranium isotope separation (Snavely
1974) also requires such lasers at high average power. Since uranium has
an ionization potential of about 6eV, at least one photon of any multi-
photon isotopic separation process will probably fall within this wave-
length regime (Snavely 1975).

Compare this with an extreme example of highly personal writing, which is

evaluative rather than factual and propositional. It may therefore be called
commentative. This is the opening of a piece of literary criticism (Pearson
1968):

At a very primary level John Berryman’s poetry worries me. Partly it’s a
matter of the way his energies are distributed and organised. There are
passages which seem to suffer from a kind of verbal thrombosis; clots of
syntax and metaphor and, consequently, areas drained, pallid and inert.
One moment the gradient is angular and abrupt, the mental scramble
demanded vertiginous. Next moment, we descend slopes of smooth
incline down which nothing busy is happening. I do not, however, want

The care and maintenance of hedges 39

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 to translate this worry into a judgement. It is probably too visceral for
that.
The use of metaphor is also a very important feature of this passage, but I
shall not discuss it here.
The relationship between proposition and comment is extremely subtle,
and the functions of modulations on propositions extremely varied. This
means that they are often imperfectly mastered. I turn now to look at a few
examples of areas in which this mastery is achieved, or where it is not but
needs to be.
Comments modulate the relationship between the speaker and the lan-
guage: they are to do with the presentation or effacement of the speaker’s
personality. The convention is that it should be ostensibly objective and
propositional (a fact which on many undergraduate courses in science and
technology produces blanket prohibitions on the word ‘I’, and the sub-
sequent use of the passive as a nervous tic). Whether it is really so or not is
more doubtful: indeed professional scientists are generally aware of the
complex relationship that exists between the distancing, impersonal com-
ments they conventionally introduce into their writing and the truth of the
matter. This is from the discussions with scientists reported in Gilbert and
Mulkay ( 1984) :
1. Everybody wants to put things in the third person. So they just say, ‘It
was found that’. 2. If it’s later shown that it was wrong, don’t accept any
responsibility. 3. It was found. I didn’t say I believed it. It was found. 4. So
you sort of get away from yourself that way and make it sound like these
things just fall down into your lab notebook and you report them like a
historian . . . 5. [It’s] a myth that we inflict on the public, that science is
rational and logical.
Failure to modulate successfully in this way is a feature of the science
student even at university undergraduate level. The following is from a
first-year electrical engineer running no-load tests on a DC motor:

The jump in the reading was enormous and a great surprise.

But the difficulties are seldom this clear, the language as gauche, at tertiary
level. What is interesting, however, is the extent to which sophisticated
readers can recognize and focus in on less obvious clumsiness of this sort.
Consider this passage about Uri Geller, the famous spoon-bender. Taken
from Reading and Thinking in English (British Council 1980), it is a text that I
have used for this purpose with both EFL and native speakers in classes.

Before we consider what mechanisms could possibly underlie the metal-

bending effect, we must first help ourselves by starting with a brief
summary of what it is that we shall have to try to explain. The multitude
of the accounts make it clear that we are dealing with a genuine effect
which can happen sometimes as a result of direct contact with a subject,
and sometimes without it. The main action in the case of direct contact
appears to be that of gentle stroking by the fingers of one hand. The
length of time taken to cause an appreciable bend seems to vary, but it is
normally less than thirty minutes and more than two or three; moreover,
for a particular subject it can vary considerably from one day to the next.

This, it seems to me, is an example of a passage in which the contract of

inexactitude is broken by presenting a string of comments in a way inten-

John Skelton

articles welcome
ded to mimic genuine scientific conventions. In general, students found it
easy to agree that it was poorly written: a typical response was:
It’s all up in the air, no facts, real . . . it’s all maybe this, maybe that, he
never gets down to it. It’s just vague.

This passage, in fact, is something of a missed opportunity in the textbook:

its lack of quality as a piece of writing and the reasons for its failure are not
brought out.
This brings us, however, to attempts to teach the relationship between
proposition and comment. To my knowledge, only one textbook attempts to
tackle something like it head on. Michael Montgomery’s Study Skills for
Colleges and Universities ( 1982), written for the ESL market in Africa, has a
unit called ‘Accuracy’ which, inter alia, warns students about the ‘dangers’
of not discriminating between ‘fact’ and ‘possibility’, or between ‘crude’
generalizations and ‘more accurate’ generalizations, as illustrated in the
following sentences:
The crop failure is due to bad weather.
The crop failure may be due to the weather.
Students like beer.
Most students like beer.
Students are advised, for instance, to avoid problems by ‘recognising the
force of a modal auxiliary’ and ‘recognising the force of adjectival and adverbial
qualifications’.
This is, of course, very much a head-on approach to counter the
unsubtlety (the ‘crudeness’, to use Montgomery’s word) of many attempts
at informative writing. The particular kind of thing Montgomery has in
mind is, in my experience, more typical of second- or foreign-language use
than of native-speaker use, but it seems intuitively obvious as a feature of
poor adult native-speaker use as well. Propositions tend not to get qualified.
One simple reason for this as far as non-native speakers are concerned is
that there is never a systematic attempt to teach ways of modulating the
force of propositions at elementary level. The felt need for such modulation
can be witnessed in the over-use of ‘very’ and ‘maybe’ in any beginners’
class, in exchanges like the following (with a group of Algerians):

Q. What was she like?

A. She was very very very very beautiful.
Q. Did he want this to happen?
A. I no.. . I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe no, maybe.

(The ‘he’ in the second question is excited and nervous about the prospect
of meeting the lady of quadrupled beauty above.)
Before the advent of the communicative syllabus, of course, much
elementary language teaching had as its central function the illustration of
verb tenses in propositional sentences (‘Peter is going to the cinema today.
He went to the cinema yesterday.‘). There is, I suggest, a need for educators
to appreciate that in much the same way as, for instance, the developing
child and the learning adult broaden the range and improve the accuracy of
their cohesive devices as a means of extending the flexibility and cognitive
force of their language (a fact recognized in more recent syllabus design), so
both child and adult must be assisted to develop the subtlety with which
they modulate the propositions they utter.

The care and maintenance of hedges 41

articles welcome
 I should like to conclude by indicating some teaching exercises I have
found useful with sophisticated and quite sophisticated adolescents and
adults of either ENL or good ESL standard: with simplification and mutatis
mutandis, they would benefit less able or younger learners. Before this,
however, let me emphasize that, as is all too common in language teaching,
this is a minor instance of materials being produced in advance of research.
No thoroughly convincing account of the modulation between proposition
and comments exists, nor is there any clear understanding as to what
factors govern the conventions about the contract of inexactitude to which I
refer above. Finally, I know of no study correlating success in language with
either the range of modulation used (the frequency with which it appears in
a text or the variety of realizations it takes: that is, with matters of quantity)
nor with its quality. These are three areas in which research is needed.
At any rate I have found the following useful.

1 Sensitization exercises, such as the type of work which can be done with the
passage from Reading and Thinking in English above. Students can be asked to
‘mark the passage out of 10’ and discuss the reasons for their mark. In this
particular text there are too many comments, too much (restoring the word
to its pejorative, ordinary language meaning) hedging. Equally, a passage
with too few comments might be used, or various versions of the same
passage with students being asked to decide which is ‘most definite’ or, as
rather more of a value judgement, which is ‘most successful’.
2 Rewriting exercises are one step on from the sensitization exercises
above. Students may be invited, for instance, to make passages more or less
definite, preferably by changing some particular circumstance - for
example, by giving students a set of data which qualifies and renders
tentative the conclusions to be drawn from an original set. The students are
then asked to modify the original conclusions by altering as little as
possible. I have also had some success at tertiary level by inviting science
students to rewrite nineteenth-century scientific prose (authors of which
are frequently highly personal and evaluative) in a more contemporary
idiom.

3 In beginner/elementary courses sets of potential comments may be built

in. These might be drawn from a list something like this:

a. seem, tend, appear, look

b. certain modal uses to indicate lack of certainty
c. a range of intensifying adjectives for basic adjectives as follows:
good - wonderful, bad - awful, happy - overjoyed, etc.
d. I think, believe, doubt, am not sure
e. adverbs of frequency, such as always, often, etc. and modifiers like very,
quite, rather (which appear in most elementary syllabuses anyway)
f. a set of free-standing expressions of doubt and uncertainty such as Well,
Mmm, I don’t know, So they say, etc.

It is fundamental to all good language work that it should enable students

to communicate: and it is fundamental to many sorts of good language work
that it fosters the student’s cognitive capacities. The claim is made here that
by the purposeful and explicit teaching, to Native-Speaker or Foreign-
Language learners, of a relatively limited range of types of comment, they
can be enabled to communicate much more successfully. Comments, in
other words, have a high surrender value. For many sorts of learner they

42 John Skelton

articles welcome
 constitute an important communication strategy. At one end of the scale,
the first-year native-speaker postgraduate may find his or her academic
writing assuming more sophistication. At the other end of the scale, the
beginner may disguise confusion or incomprehension by using a little of the
language of equivocation indicated at (f) above (anyone who has come face-
to-face on a noisy train with an unfamiliar accent has employed tentative
gap-fillers in much the same way).
The claim is also made here that by drawing students’ attention to a
limited range of surface features (the words or grammatical forms through
which comments are realized), cognitive capacity, which is normally taken
to be somehow ‘deep’, is fostered. •
Received January 1987

References 15, collected in I. Hamilton (ed.): The Modern Poet:

Bradley, L. P. 1976. ‘Electron-beam pumping of Essays from The Review. MacDonald ( 1968).
visible and ultraviolet gas lasers.’ Institute of Physics Prince, E. F., J. Frader and C. Bosk. 1982. ‘On
Conference Series, No. 29. hedging in physician-physician discourse’ in R. J. di
British Council 1980. Reading and Thinking in English: Pietro (ed.): Linguistics and the Professions. Hillsdale,
Discourse in Action. Oxford: Oxford University Press. NJ: Ablex.
Gilbert, G. N. and M. Mulkay 1984. Opening Pandora’s Rounds, P. L. 1982. ‘Hedging in Written Academic
Box: A Sociological Analysis of Scientists’ Discourse. Discourse: Precision and Flexibility’ (mimeo).
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Skelton, J. 1983. ‘Teaching and the linguistic critic.’
Lakoff, G. 1972. ‘Hedges: a study in meaning criteria Use of English 34/2.
and the logic of fuzzy concepts’ in P. Peranteau, J.
Levi and G. Phares (eds.): Papers from the Eighth
Regional Meeting, Chicago Linguistics Society. The author
Lakoff, R. 1972. ‘The pragmatics of modality’ in Per- John Skelton has worked in Spain and London, as
anteau et al. (eds.): Papers from the Eighth Regional British Council Director of Studies in Oman, and for
Meeting, Chicago Linguistics Society. the National University of Singapore. Since 1984 he
Montgomery, M. 1982. Study Skills for Colleges and has worked at the Language Studies Unit, Aston Uni-
Universities in Africa. London: Longman. versity, Birmingham, where he has been Director of
Pearson, G. 1968. ‘John Berryman’ in The Review No Studies since 1985.

The care and maintenance of hedges 43

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