Language % Communicaoon. Vol. IO. No. 3. pp. 185-205. 1990. Printed in Great Britain. OYI-5309190 53.00 + .00 Pergamon Press plc HEDGES AND BOOSTERS IN WOMEN’S JANET HOLMES 1. Introduction AND MEN’S SPEECH Though Robin Lakoff’s (1973, 1975) claims about the linguistic forms she considered characteristic of ‘women’s language’ have been attacked, misrepresented, qualified, refuted and constantly criticised over the last 15 years, no one can say they have been uninfluential.’ As a result of her hypotheses about the way women speak and why, we now know a great deal more about the speech behaviour of women compared to men than we did in 1973. My own research on epistemic modality led very naturally to the collection of data which could appropriately be used to examine Lakoff’s claims. Many of the features she identified as characteristic of women’s language, including hesitations, rising intonation, tag questions, hedges and intensifiers, are linguistic devices which may be used to express epistemic modality or degrees or certainty about a proposition (see Holmes, 1982a, 1983). Indeed Lakoff selected them quite explicitly, if somewhat arbitrarily, as ways in which speakers express uncertainty or tentativeness about a statement. She pointed out (Lakoff, 1975, pp. 53-54) that speakers might use these devices when genuinely uncertain about the facts, or alternatively to mitigate the force of an utterance ‘for the sake of politeness’; these uses, she implied, were quite ‘legitimate’. But, she claimed, women tend to use such devices for a third reason, namely, to express themselves tentatively without warrant or justification when ‘the speaker is perfectly certain of the truth of the assertion, and there’s no danger of offense, but the tag appears anyway as an apology for making an assertion at all’ (1975, p. 54). With a rich data base of speech collected to explore the ways in which native speakers of English express epistemic modality, I was well placed to examine Lakoff’s claims about ‘women’s language’ in at least some contexts. 2 I therefore decided to explore in some detail the distribution of a number of linguistic forms in women’s and men’s speech. In order to avoid at this stage the semantic assumptions encoded in labels such as ‘hedge’ and ‘intensifier’ I will refer to these forms initially as pragmatic particles. In this paper I intend to summarise the findings on each of the following: (1) the tag question; (2) three pragmatic particles usually regarded as hedges: sort of, you know and I think; (3) a pragmatic particle usually regarded as an intensifier: of course. The first step in the analysis of the distribution of these forms in women’s and men’s speech involved rectifying two weaknesses in much of the research which has attempted to investigate Lakoff’s claims. Firstly it was necessary to indentify carefully the relevant linguistic forms and their functions; secondly it was important to devise a methodology to protect against avoidable bias in the data collection and analysis. Correspondence relating to this paper should be addressed to Janet Holmes, Department of Linguistics, Victoria University of Wellington, P.O. Box 600, Wellington, New Zealand. 185