Such devices typically include parenthetical verbs, syntactic constructions, token agreements, hedges, challenge questions, discourse markers, and tag questions, among others (Flores-Ferrán and Lovejoy 2015).
kaltenbök, Mihatsch, and Schneider (2010, page 1) define hedging as "a discourse strategy that reduces the force or truth of an utterance and thus reduces the risk a speaker runs when uttering a strong or firm assertion or other speech act."