• Discourse Analysis
• Discourse Marker
• Modification
• Premodifier
• Stance
• Submodifier
• Verbal Hedge

Examples and Observations:

• "A great book should leave you with many experiences, and slightly exhausted. You should live several lives while reading it."
  (William Styron)

• "Every actor is somewhat mad, or else he'd be a plumber or a bookkeeper or a salesman."
  (Bela Lugosi)
• "She wore a large, dowdy hat of black beaver, and a sort of slightly affected simple dress that made her look rather sack-like."
  (D.H. Lawrence, Sons and Lovers, 1913)
• "His wife was not beautiful, like Catherine Fawley, but she was awfully pretty and rather sort of mischievous."
  (Iris Murdoch, The Bell, 1958)
• "It is not surprising that sort of combines with other downtoners and affect markers. Sort of pretty, sort of slightly, rather sort of, sort of probably is a downtoner just as much as a simple sort of; sort of you know is a hearer-oriented discourse particle while just sort of and sort of really have acquired the function of hedging something which is too strong or exaggerated."
  (Karin Aijmer, English Discourse Particles: Evidence From a Corpus. John Benjamins, 2002)
• "Here's a question once posed to me, by a large, baseball-cap-wearing English major at a medium-size western college: Is it our duty to read Infinite Jest? This is a good question, and one that many people, particularly literary-minded people, ask themselves. The answer is: Maybe. Sort of. Probably, in some way. If we think it's our duty to read this book, it's because we're interested in genius."
  (Dave Eggers, Foreword to Infinite Jest by David Foster Wallace. Little, Brown and Company, 1996)

• "'I'm like ninety-seven-point-two percent sure. I mean, I'm pretty sure his bedroom is right there,' she said, pointing. 'One time he had a party, and when the cops came I shimmied out his window. I'm pretty sure it's the same window.'"
  (John Green, Paper Towns, 2009)
• "Japan is often used as an example of a linguistically homogeneous country with a strong national culture and relatively unimportant subcultures."
  (Betty Jane Punnett, International Perspectives on Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, 2009)
• "Many downtoners are roughly synonymous in meaning. . . . However, it turns out that the most common downtoners have quite different distributions across registers. . . . In conversation, the downtoner pretty is very common, while all other downtoners are quite rare. In contrast, academic prose uses a wider range of common downtoners, although none of them is extremely frequent.
  
  "Further analysis shows that downtoners are also used for different purposes in conversation and academic prose. For example, the downtoner pretty in conversation often occurs as a modifier of evaluative adjectives, as in pretty good, pretty bad, pretty cool, pretty easy, pretty sure. . . . In contrast, downtoners in academic prose occur with a much wider range of descriptive adjectives. For example, the downtoner fairly occurs repeatedly with adjectives such as resistant, consistent, constant, simple, obvious, common, recent, and direct. Many of the downtoner + adjective collocations in academic prose have to do with marking the extent of comparison between two items (e.g slightly smaller, somewhat lower). The downtoner relatively always has an implied comparison, as in relatively simple, relatively stable, relatively unimportant."
  (Douglas Biber and Susan Conrad, "Register Variation: A Corpus Approach," in The Handbook of Discourse Analysis, ed. by Deborah Schiffrin et al. Wiley-Blackwell, 2003)