Linguistic hedging as a communicative strategy (within the scope of corpus studies)

Abstract
The paper deals with linguistic hedging, which is being researched within the corpus approach and accounted for through sociolinguistic criteria. Several definitions of hedging are considered and most common linguistic means of its manifestation listed. The choice of the means of hedging is also explained within the framework of the politeness theory. In addition, the article develops the idea of using corpus tools to analyze hedging from both quantitative and contextual perspective. The data and the tools of the British National Corpus have been used to exemplify corpus research of some lexical bundles, also referred to as word clusters. The paper elaborates on overcoming the ambiguity of cross language correspondences, too.

Keywords: hedging, communicative strategy of hedging, corpus research, lexical bundles, politeness theory