The feedback of the fifth exercise:

1. The hedges that the speaker uses in clip I were:
   
   so to speak
   
   so to say
   
   In clip II the hedges were:
   
   sort of
   
   quote unquote
   
   so it seems
   
   

2. The speaker uses these hedges because he overall wishes to stand a little aside from what he is saying. In the fist case he probably uses 'so to speak' because he refers to his research question as a problem at first and immediately wishes to soften this view. In the second case he most likely uses 'so to say' to put what he has already suggested in other words, i.e. he wishes to clarify the term detrimentally by describing it as a 'stumbling block, so to say'.
   In the case of the first hedge of the second clip he uses a very very common and perhaps slightly less formal a hedge 'sort of'. The purpose of this hedge is probably just to function as a sentence filler and to soften the notion of the in-joke. In the second case he uses 'quote unquote' to precede a kind of a jargon word. Perhaps 'quote unquote' is most often used in this particular sense. And in the third and final case we already have the example from the sample sentence of the theory section. With 'so it seems' the speaker can give the impression that he does not mean to be 'arrogant' with that he is saying, but that his point is, nonetheless, valid.

3. There are a number of samples of the use of these hedges in MICASE and the number of hits obviously depends on how and if one narrows down the search parametres. In making these searches we have left the search parametres on on 'all' in all categories. Here are the amount hits of the hedges from the clips: 'so to speak' produces 20 hits from various different speech events; 'so to say' produces 5 hits from 3 different speech events; 'sort of' is a HUGE hit producing 1962 hits, which perhaps goes to prove also how common a sentence filler it is; 'quote unquote' in its turn produces a slightly more modest an amount of hits with 15 from 10 different speech events; and finally 'so it seems' produces 8 hits from 8 different speech events. What do these amounts tell us? Well, for one, they tell that 'sort of' is a very very often used hedge whereas all the other ones tend to be a less frequent. If one really wanted to study how these hedges for example vary between academic formal and less formal speech events and between native speakers and non-native speakers, one could really spend a lot of time on them, but you were not asked to do that here; this is merely a pointer for potential enthusiasts!