Pragmatic Syncretism in the Use of Hedges (Based on Russian Thesis Reviews)

Introduction. The article deals with pragmatic syncretism and syncretic aspects  of hedges – words and phrases  used to mitigate claims, that is make them vaguer, more tentative  and more uncertain. Hedges are looked upon as a type of discourse markers which are focused on the writer-reader interaction  and the writer’s self-presentation.

Methodology and sources. The research is based  on the speech  genre of the official thesis review known for its especially mitigated language, which may be determined  by publicity of thesis  defences at a viva voce in Russia, positive evaluation of thesis  made at a predefence stage and potential personal relations of the degree seeker, their supervisor and the reviewer. The corpus  of 64  reviews (about  90 000  words) written by Russian scholars  was analyzed including reviews in linguistics, literature studies, history, physics, chemistry and medicine.

Results and discussion. The author introduces  the notion of pragmatic syncretism  which involves the  merging  or  assimilation  of  several  pragmatic  functions  performed   by one linguistic unit while realizing several illocutionary tasks. The research allowed to single out two varieties  of hedges:  1) single purpose  hedges  aimed only at mitigation of claims and 2) general purpose hedges aimed at mitigation of claims together with some other interactive task. Among these  additional tasks are the following: authorization  (self-mentions), performative, evaluative in relation both to the proposition or to the words used by the author. According to the quantitative analysis, syncretic hedges  make up 52 % of all hedges  used in the  reviews.  The author  provides  the  pragmatically  oriented  analysis  of syncretic  hedges realizing strategies of indetermination, subjectivisation  and depersonalization. Strategies  of subjectivisation  and depersonalization are registered  as most frequent.

Conclusion.  It is emphasized  that hedges  are predisposed  to syncretic usage  due to their inherent  modal meanings which are realized integrally and which are, therefore, difficult to specify. The ontological ground of this tendency  is associated with the symbiotic nature  of human  thinking where  rational  and  sensuous  baselines   are  naturally  and  productively reconciled.

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