Hedge is a word/phrase that allows a speaker/writer to express his/her evaluation of the degree of confidence in the proposition that is being made, i.e., epistemic modality.

In American English one is more likely to find such hedges as maybe, kind of, and like, while BrE has more occurrences of perhaps and sort of. For example I can say, “Maybe the notion of ‘soon’ in BrE is expressed by ‘presently’”.