A Corpus-based Study of Downtoners – slightly and somewhat – as Hedging Devices in Indian English

Abstract

Linguistically, hedges are considered as rhetorical devices that make utterances fuzzier or less fuzzy. In other words, they are understatements that convey purposive tentativeness and vagueness and possibly reduce the risk of negation. Downtoners are considered as one of the most important hedging devices. One of the successful domains of corpus linguistics is in the analysis of contextual variations of lexis. Such analyses of language variation and lexicography through corpus linguistics can be more reliably compared to intuitive studies of applied linguistics. This study seeks to analyze and understand the variations found in the use of two near synonymous hedging expressions – slightly and somewhat – based on the data from Kolhapur Corpus. It begins with a simplistic comparison of frequencies and dispersions of these two downtoners based on their occurrences in the Brown Corpus, the LOB Corpus and the Kolhapur Corpus. In the second stage, based on the retrieval of all instances of slightly and somewhat from the Kolhapur Corpus of Indian English, they are analyzed in terms of the lexical items they have modified, the word classes they have represented, and the medium and register of those instances. Finally, this study seeks to determine how these two expressions differ and the external and internal factors that influence the choice of a hedging device.