Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts

Summary

This paper introduced "hedges" as a linguistic term: words and phrases whose job is to make things more or less fuzzy, such as sort of, kind of, technically, loosely speaking or par excellence. Starting from the observation that category membership is a matter of degree (a robin is a more typical bird than a penguin), the author argues that natural-language concepts have fuzzy boundaries. He uses fuzzy-set ideas to model degrees of membership and shows that hedges operate on these degrees, for example by restricting a predicate to its central members or extending it to peripheral ones. He also argues that some hedges are sensitive to which properties of a concept are considered defining versus characteristic. The paper had a lasting influence on semantics, cognitive linguistics and, later, on computational work on hedging and uncertainty.

How Mova uses it

• prag/data/cues.tsv — the hedge entries in Mova's small hand-made cue list (sort of, kind of, maybe, I think and similar) take this paper, together with Hyland 1998, as their conceptual basis; the list itself is Mova's own.
• prag/src/feats.rs — the cue becomes the hedge feature slot used by all three pragmatic classifiers in prag/src/model.rs.
• Only the notion of a hedge and typical examples are used; the fuzzy-logic formalism of the paper is not implemented.

Effectiveness in Mova

Not measured separately (the cue list is not ablated). For context, the prag README reports for the hedge field, five-fold cross-validation on 2,986 sentences, accuracy / macro-F1 %: majority baseline 97.3 / 49.3, perceptron 98.1 / 76.3, IGTree 98.0 / 75.5, k-NN 97.8 / 73.4.

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Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. DOI 10.1007/bf00262952

@article{lakoff1973hedges,
  title = {{Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts}},
  author = {Lakoff, George},
  journal = {Journal of Philosophical Logic},
  year = {1973},
  doi = {10.1007/bf00262952},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952}
}

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