PROPOSITIONAL HEDGING AS A MEANS OF MEANING MODIFICATION

Abstract

The article discusses a concept of hedging in the light of semantics. The author focuses on propositional hedging, which is defined as “a means of modifying the predicate of a proposition allowing you to alter the degree of its truth”. The primary goal of this study is to discover how hedging affects the degree of truth of the initial proposition and modifies the meaning of an utterance. Drawing on existing research on the subject, in particular George Lakoff’s “Hedges: A study in meaning criteria and the logic of fuzzy concepts” (1973), and applying the methodology of fuzzy sets and propositional logic, the author revealed that the hedge “very”, which serves as an intensifier of propositional predicate, shifts the range of the degree of truth towards higher values, whereas the hedge “sort of”, which functions as a deintensifier of propositional predicate, narrows the range of values close to true. The analysis carried out in this study allows us to draw a conclusion about the non-binary nature of truth as such, about the importance of context in determining the degree of truth of a proposition, and about the close connection between semantic hedging and pragmatics.