This is kind of / sort of interesting : variation in hedging in English

One of the domains where corpus linguistics has been particularly successful is the analysis of variation in the choice of lexical items that is governed by the context around the slot into which one out of several functionally similar lexical items is to be inserted. In this study, we investigate the variation found in two near synonymous hedging expressions kind of and sort of on the basis of data from contemporary British English. We first retrieved all instances of kind of and sort of from the British National Corpus World edition. As a second step, we annotated each instance for: i. the lexical item(s) that the hedging expression modified; ii. the word class(es) instantiated by these expressions; iii. the medium and the register of the instance. Finally, we investigated the resulting multidimensional table using distinctive collocate/collexeme analysis (cf. Church et al. 1994, Gries 2003, Gries and Stefanowitsch 2004) and techniques for the analysis of multidimensional contingency tables to determine how and to what extent the two expressions differ. Our discussion of the results focuses on factors that govern the choice of hedge; the factors include (i) factors external to language (viz., the situationally/contextually defined register or text type of the utterance(s) in question) and (ii) factors internal to language (viz., the so far unnoticed preferences of kind of and sort of to be used together with particular lexical items and semantic fields).