• The Journal of the Convergence on Culture Technology
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• v.6 no.1
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• pp.381-388
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• 2020

This paper discusses English Hedges or Hedging Expressions on the basis of their morphosyntactic-pragramatic properties within the perspective of sociolinguistics. The term, 'Hedges' for the past decades since Lakoff(1973), has received little attention from the English grammar circles such as morphosyntax and the generative grammar theories. This paper presents a more comprehensive approach to the identification, distributions, functions, and the morphosyntactic properties of English Hedges. The earlier research on English Hedges in the 70's show that hedges are metalinguistic or mitadiscourse expressions which constitute a means for executing Politeness strategy in pragmatics. Nonetheless, research from the interface of syntactic-pragmatics has been scarce. This article suggests a more complex body of English hedges that have not been extensively discussed in the literature. Additionally, their configurational domain is to be proposed as part of the PolP with [±hedged] above CP⁺ (or CP beyond). The ramifications of the current study are suggested in terms of comparative linguistics, EFL/ESL studies of English for global communication, and pragmatics-sensitive machine translation studies in the forseeable future.