Preface -- I. Introduction -- Hedging: A Challenge for Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis -- II. Hedging Strategies in Academic Discourse -- Hedging Strategies in Written Academic Discourse: Strengthening the Argument by Weakening the Claim -- How to Tell the Truth in The British Medical Journal: Patterns of Judgement in the 19th and 20th Centuries -- Hedging in Russian Academic Writing in Sociological Texts -- III. Interactive Aspects of Hedging -- Hedges and Readers: Effects on Attitudes and Learning -- Hedging in Language Revisers' Hands -- Hedging in Expert-Language Reviews -- IV. Cross-cultural Aspects of Hedging -- On the Writing of Science and the Science of Writing: Hedging in Science Text and Elsewhere -- Impersonalization as a Form of Hedging -- Interlanguage View on Hedging -- Some Observations on Hedging Phenomena and Modifying Devices as Regional Markers in the Speech of Young East Germans -- V. Hedging: The Concept, its Origins and a Bibliographical Guide -- The Concept of Hedging: Origins, Approaches and Definitions -- Hedging Research in Pragmatics: A Bibliographical Research Guide to Hedging -- Name Index -- Subject Index.