New Approaches to Hedging -- Copyright -- Table of Contents -- List of Contributors -- Acknowledgments -- Announcement -- Introduction -- 1. Pragmatic Competence: The Case of Hedging -- 2. A Contrastive Approach to Vague Nouns -- 3. Hedges in Context: Form and Function of Sort of and Kind of -- 4. Mitigating and Being Vague in Interpreter-Mediated Discourse -- 5. The Diachrony of Rounders and Adaptors: Approximation and Unidirectional Change -- 6. Hyperbolic Approximative Numerals in Cross-Cultural Comparison -- 7. Approximative Expressions and their Loose Uses in Chinese -- 8. Weakening or Strengthening?: A Case of Enantiosemy in Plato's Gorgias -- 9. Position and Scope of Epistemic Phrases in Planned and Unplanned American English -- 10. Pragmatic Functions of Parenthetical I Think -- 11. Parenthetical Hedged Performatives -- 12. On the Relationship between Attenuation, Discourse Particles and Position -- Subject Index.