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AACL 2008 American Association for Corpus Linguistics March 13-15 Brigham Young University-Provo, UTAH The use of hedging devices in American English. Identifying some trends in the FROWN corpus Adriana Teresa Damascelli ITALY (Language Centre for Humanities- CLIFU) Email: adrianateresa damascelli (unito. it Introduction Lakoffs articleHedges: a study of meaning criteria discussed the problems of vagueness and fuzziness in language and applied the term hedgeto those words hose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuz 72: 471).(e.g: sort of, kind of Hedging has received much attention in casual conversation as a means to facilitate turn-taking, show politeness, mitigate face-threats, but it is also considered as a means to convey vagueness purposely In any case, hedging represents an important aspect of language where the appropriate use of hedges reflects efficient social interaction by showing the ability to express degrees of certainty and mastering rhetorical strategies required under certain circumstances The study of hedging has been carried out constantly over the last twenty years. Literature includes various works on the topic where labels such as compromisers (James, 1983), downtoners (Quirk et al. 1972), weakeners(Brown and Levinson, 1987), and softeners Crystal and davy. 1975)are used Such labels include lexical verbs (e. g: seem, tend ppear), modals(e. g. may, might) and some adverbs (probably, perhaps), although condition clauses, passive voices, and impersonal phrases have also been included .However, notwithstanding the importance given to ledging. little is known about the distribution or use il ifferent disciplines and genres(Hyland, 1998)- Aims of the present study To carry out a corpus-based investigation by exploring the FROWN corpus of American English: Made up of I million word Made up of samples of texts belonging to different domains and dating back to 1990s To retrieve data about hedging devices as used in different domains and detect a