Textual Example: Approximators & Shields

In the example below, there are both kinds of hedging construction: approximators & shields.

Example 1

[Source: Law Term-time Paper]

"The question of how cases outside the civil liberties issue area are decided has not been addressed, and it might be that such cases are decided relatively less attitudinally than civil liberties cases; Segal et al. (1995) find somewhat less convincing results for economic issues than civil liberties issues. Equally it has been assumed that judicial civil liberties attitudes can be represented on a unidimensional scale, and, as the results have implied, this may well be open to question."

Analysis

The word “somewhat”, in the phrase “somewhat less convincing”, is a hedge of the approximator type, since it modifies the adjective phrase to make it less precise and less forceful.  The phrase “may well be” is a hedge of the shield type (i.e. a Modal of Probability), since it indicates that the writer is not fully convinced that “such cases are decided relatively less attitudinally”. The writer allows the possibility that there may be another interpretation of the data and, thus, she does not fully commit herself to the truth of his statement.

© AWH 2025