---
title: "Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the — Lakoff 1973"
description: "This paper introduced \"hedges\" as a linguistic term: words and phrases whose job is to make things more or less fuzzy, such as sort of , kind of…"
authors: ["George Lakoff"]
year: 1973
venue: "Journal of Philosophical Logic"
source: "https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952"
doi: "10.1007/bf00262952"
licence: "Not open access (publisher copyright) — card only, no text (Journal of Philosophical Logic)"
summary_licence: "Elamur Cosmic License"
canonical: "https://research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lakoff-1973-hedges-study-meaning-criteria/"
---
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# Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts

**Authors:** George Lakoff · **Year:** 1973 · **Venue:** Journal of Philosophical Logic, vol. 2, no. 4 **Link:** unknown **License of the paper:** unknown

[**1443** citations](https://openalex.org/works?filter=cites:W4249470828) OpenAlex · 2026-10-14 · [**43** citations in our library](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/lakoff-1973-hedges-study-meaning-criteria/cited-by/) of the 140884 papers whose bibliographies we read · [Journal of Philosophical Logic](https://openalex.org/S161120620)

- [Publisher's page](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952)
- [DOI 10.1007/bf00262952](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952)
- [OpenAlex](https://openalex.org/W4249470828)

**Authors (1)**

1. [George Lakoff](https://openalex.org/A5000829187) [ORCID](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8972-2856) · [Semantic Scholar](https://www.semanticscholar.org/author/143716922) · h 77 · 83870 citations · 430 works

Citations and author metrics: OpenAlex, 2026-10-14; authors with the same name are not always told apart.

## Summary

This paper introduced "hedges" as a linguistic term: words and phrases whose job is to make things more or less fuzzy, such as *sort of*, *kind of*, *technically*, *loosely speaking* or *par excellence*. Starting from the observation that category membership is a matter of degree (a robin is a more typical bird than a penguin), the author argues that natural-language concepts have fuzzy boundaries. He uses fuzzy-set ideas to model degrees of membership and shows that hedges operate on these degrees, for example by restricting a predicate to its central members or extending it to peripheral ones. He also argues that some hedges are sensitive to which properties of a concept are considered defining versus characteristic. The paper had a lasting influence on semantics, cognitive linguistics and, later, on computational work on hedging and uncertainty.

## How Mova uses it

- `prag/data/cues.tsv` — the hedge entries in Mova's small hand-made cue list (*sort of*, *kind of*, *maybe*, *I think* and similar) take this paper, together with Hyland 1998, as their conceptual basis; the list itself is Mova's own.
- `prag/src/feats.rs` — the cue becomes the `hedge` feature slot used by all three pragmatic classifiers in `prag/src/model.rs`.
- Only the notion of a hedge and typical examples are used; the fuzzy-logic formalism of the paper is not implemented.

## Effectiveness in Mova

Not measured separately (the cue list is not ablated). For context, the `prag` README reports for the `hedge` field, five-fold cross-validation on 2,986 sentences, accuracy / macro-F1 %: majority baseline 97.3 / 49.3, perceptron 98.1 / 76.3, IGTree 98.0 / 75.5, k-NN 97.8 / 73.4.

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## Cite

The paper itself, not this card. BibTeX from the library's record of the work. [DOI 10.1007/bf00262952](https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952)

```bibtex
@article{lakoff1973hedges,
  title = {{Hedges: A Study in Meaning Criteria and the Logic of Fuzzy Concepts}},
  author = {Lakoff, George},
  journal = {Journal of Philosophical Logic},
  year = {1973},
  doi = {10.1007/bf00262952},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1007/bf00262952}
}
```

- [↑ back to papers of 1973](https://md.research.elamur.ai/free/en/papers/1973/)