Is there a chance that I might kinda sort of take you out to dinner?: The role of the pragmatic particles kind of and sort of in utterance interpretation

This is a descriptive exploration of the meaning of the English particles kind of and sort of. Mainly perceived as mere hedges or fillers, and burdened with an infamous reputation of having been rigorously persecuted and banished from good language, kind of and sort of have not only resisted but are actually thriving. Whether this was right or wrong, I leave it to the reader to judge; if nothing else, kind of and sort of deserve to have a chapter of their own.This article, therefore, sets out to explore various aspects of the linguistic existence of the particles in order to get a better understanding of the roles they may have in communication. The first part is an overview of some previous accounts of kind of and sort of. The second part delineates their syntactic behavior as adjectival and adverbial modifiers and traces their development from nouns to pragmatic particles. The third, central, part proposes a semantic analysis of the particles relying on the relevance-theoretic notion of ‘weak explicature’. The fourth part is a concise sociopragmatic description of certain tendencies that the particles exhibited in my data. Sociolinguistic parameters aside, the overall conclusion is that kind of and sort of are semantic–pragmatic synonyms but that kind of might have gone further on the discoursization path leaving sort of stranded, as it were, with their semantics.