The Use of kind of/Sort of as a Parenthetical

Haixia WANG

Abstract


Kind of/sort of as a parenthetical is variously used in present-day English. It may serve the function of hedging, appealing to common ground, mitigating assertive force or filling a pause. Most of the functions of the syntactically flexible kind of/sort of can be taken as extensions from the core meaning of metalinguistic hedge as a result of further grammaticalization and the specific interpretation of the various functions is negotiated by the context.


Keywords


Kind of/sort of; Parenthetical; Functions; Core meaning; Extension

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.3968/11085

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