HEDGED ASSERTIONS IN MOMADAY’S THE MAN MADE OF WORDS

Guillermo Bartelt

Abstract


In essays elucidating his beliefs in the sacredness of the Southwestern landscape, the relevance of American Indian oral tradition, and the power of language in shaping Native worldviews, Scott Momaday frequently qualifies declarative sentences focusing on these themes with evidential hedges formed with epistemic modals and adverbials as well as with attitudinal hedges consisting of pronoun-verb constructions. Since an assertion implies knowledge of the proposition, hedges are therefore indicative of a distancing from convictions of its truth, or at least of a weakened commitment to its assertoric force.

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Keywords


American Indian non-fiction, stylistics, evidential and attitudinal hedges

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References


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DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.46827/ejls.v3i1.309

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