(1)     The man bought a red car. 

The Ascriptive Subacts in (1) are cases of straightforward ascription, in the sense that the various properties expressed by the lexical elements are presented by the speaker without modification. There are many cases, however, in which a speaker does not simply ascribe selected properties, and there is a range of linguistic strategies that can be interpreted as encoding various types of non-straightforward ascription. These include the following:

(i)      dummy strategies: when the speaker cannot find the appropriate lexeme or for other reasons does not want to disclose the information connected with that lexeme, dummy elements may act as fillers of Ascriptive Subacts (e.g. thingummy)

(ii)  approximation strategies: when the speaker feels the lexeme chosen only approximately serves his/her purposes, an approximative element may be used (e.g. sort-of)

(iii)   reportative strategies: when the speaker wants to attribute the choice of lexemes to others, he/she may use a reportative element (e.g. so-called).

Our talk consists of two parts. In the first part, we present the strategies listed here from a cross-linguistic perspective, showing the relevance of the distinctions made, and arguing on the basis of distributional arguments that these indeed belong to the layer of the Ascriptive Subact at the Interpersonal Level in FDG. In the second part, we show how the various strategies are relevant to the grammar of English. A corpus-based analysis reveals (a) that for each of the three functions mentioned English has a large number of expressions available; (b) that the form of these expressions varies not only according to the type of ascription involved, but also according to the denotation of the head; (c) that many of these expressions also operate at other layers; and (d) that it may not always be easy to distinguish between approximation and mitigation.