0 the quality of not being certain or confident: --
The team's tentativeness at the start was understandable.
Despite the tentativeness of their titles, these monographs introduced radical interpretations of nature that would reverberate through the sciences, and particularly the biology, of the next century.
One should not draw a distinction between gentleness and tentativeness.
I have never understood the tentativeness about freight on this high-speed line.
I do not share the view expressed as to the tentativeness of paragraph 10 of the communiqué.
By using this hedge, a speaker can add the nuance of tentativeness to an utterance, which has the effect of evading commitment and softening the statement.
We discuss the nature of discourse tentativeness, the pragmatic reasons for using an attitudinal modal past form, and the observation that complement clauses of thought sometimes yield several modal readings.
As we will see in section 3, the past tense is used here for reasons of discourse tentativeness, although it may also be meant to be sarcastic.
The modified claims that believers should at least strive towards tentativeness or towards non-belief are also inadequate.
