This study reexamines Lakoff’s (1973) claim that women use more hedges than men is true. Because of the vast number of hedges, this study focuses on two hedges: I think and I’m sure. It also investigates how the included hedges are used by men and women to express belief and opinion. The study has been carried out with the help of a corpus called British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014). From this database, authentic conversations that include these hedges in clause-final position have been extracted. By using the extracted and processed data, a conclusion can be drawn regarding similarities and differences in how often men and women use these hedges and in what context they are used. The results show that Lakoff’s (1973) claim has a certain truth to it, since 63.0% of the valid I think tokens and 67.6% of the valid I’m sure tokens were produced by women. As for the expression of belief or opinion, the results points towards I think and I’m sure upholding traditional gender traits.

Made available in DSpace on 2016-06-02T20:12:20Z (GMT). No. of bitstreams: 1 6325.pdf: 920868 bytes, checksum: 58062f900291895b5f3831523da0038b (MD5) Previous issue date: 2014-07-04 / The purpose of this thesis is to examine the problem of the consciousness in the Critique of pure reason, specially the concept of consciousness of the Self, and the determination of the internal sense through consciousness. We will follow Kant s indication that there is a clear distinction of the knowing subject in a passive and an active dimension we believe that this distinction does not convert the knowing subject into a being possessing two different and irreconciliable parts. Opposing to this view, we want to, defend that Kant s distinction concerns two ways, the objective and the subjective dimensions, of considering the knowing subject. At first, we will analyze the subjective passive dimension; here we underscore the internal sense and his pure form, time, along with the difficulties that come from the interpretations about the internal sense in Kant. Secondly, we discuss the objective dimension of the knowledge; we given attention here to Kant s conception of Self-consciousness and Consciousness. In this part, we consider the necessary concepts for comprehending this issue, in particular, the concept of Transcendental Apperception, the I thin. We take into account the numerical identity of the consciousness and Kant s analysis of the Self-consciousness. Finally, in the third part, we focus on the issue of how the understanding as a self-consciousness determines the internal sense. This point, as we intend to show, requires a close examination of the transcendental synthesis of imagination and its implication to the comprehension of the different modes of the internal sense. This analysis, we believe, shows that the subject, in Kant s philosophy, far from being characterized by a duplicity of parts or faculties of an real or concrete subject, is only one and the same subject considered in its double dimension: the subjective and the objective sides concerning the same subject, that is, two distinct acts from the same consciousness, which is the self-consciousness. / O propósito desta tese é examinar o problema da consciência na Crítica da Razão Pura de Kant, em especial o conceito de consciência de si e a determinação do sentido interno pela consciência. Seguiremos as indicações do próprio Kant, que faz uma distinção clara do sujeito do conhecimento, segundo uma dimensão passiva e outra ativa, na produção do conhecimento. Essa clara divisão, acreditamos, não cinde o sujeito em um duplo irreconciliável, mas caracteriza os modos, isto é, as dimensões objetiva e subjetiva do sujeito cognoscente. Analisaremos em um primeiro momento a dimensão passiva do sujeito, isto é, o sentido interno e sua forma, o tempo e as dificuldades advindas das interpretações sobre o sentido interno em Kant. No segundo momento, faremos uma discussão sobre a dimensão objetiva do conhecimento, isto é, a consciência de si e todos os conceitos que se fazem necessários para a sua compreensão, como por exemplo, apercepção transcendental, eu penso, identidade numérica da consciência e uma descrição do que é, para Kant, a consciência de si. Por fim, no terceiro momento, a tarefa a que nos propomos é a demonstração de como o entendimento, como consciência de si, determina o sentido interno. Para isso, discutiremos a síntese transcendental da imaginação para uma compreensão dos modos de determinação do sentido interno. Com esta demonstração acreditamos que o sujeito em Kant não se caracteriza por uma duplicidade, mas como um sujeito que tem uma dupla dimensão, a saber, subjetiva e objetiva que se caracterizam como atos de uma mesma consciência, a consciência de si.

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