Hedging and Discourse

Hedging and Discourse
Author: Raija Markkanen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 293
Release: 2010-10-06
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110807335

Hedging and Discourse

Hedging and Discourse
Author: Raija Markkanen
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 300
Release: 1997
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9783110155914

This volume reviews the present state of researchin heding and contains studies of heding strategies in English, German, Finnish and Russin, using various academic text-types as exemplars. The papers deal with aspects of 'hedging' from the perspective of intercultural contact, particularly in foreign language learning, writing in the foreign language, and translation. concept of breakthrough.

New Approaches to Hedging

New Approaches to Hedging
Author: Gunther Kaltenböck
Publisher: BRILL
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2012-11-02
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9004253246

Hedging is an essential part of everyday communication. It is a discourse strategy which is used to reduce commitment to the force or truth of an utterance to achieve an appropriate pragmatic effect. In recent years hedges have therefore attracted increased attention in Pragmatics and Applied Linguistics, with studies approaching the concept of hedging from various perspectives, such as speech act - and politeness theory, genre-specific investigations, interactional pragmatics, and studies of vague language. The present volume provides an up-to-date overview of current research on the topic by bringing together studies from a variety of fields. The contributions span a range of different languages, investigate the use of hedges in different communicative settings and text types, and consider all levels of linguistic analysis from prosody to morphology, syntax and semantics. What unites the different studies in this volume is a corpus-based approach, in which various theoretical concepts and categories are applied to, and tested against, actual language data. This allows for patterns of use to be uncovered which have previously gone unnoticed and provides valuable insights for the adjustment and fine-tuning of existing categories. The usage-based approach of the investigations therefore offers new theoretical and descriptive perspectives on the context-dependent nature and multifunctionality of hedges.

Hedging in Scientific Research Articles

Hedging in Scientific Research Articles
Author: Ken Hyland
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 319
Release: 1998-03-15
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027282587

This book provides a comprehensive study of hedging in academic research papers, relating a systematic analysis of forms to a pragmatic explanation for their use. Based on a detailed examination of journal articles and interviews with research scientists, the study shows that the extensive use of possibility and tentativeness in research writing is intimately connected to the social and institutional practices of academic communities and is at the heart of how knowledge comes to be socially accredited through texts. The study identifies the major forms, functions and distribution of hedges and explores the research article genre in detail to present an explanatory framework based on a complex social and ideological interpretive environment. The results show that hedging is central to Scientific argument, individual scientists and, ultimately, to science itself. The importance of hedging to student writers is also recognised and a chapter devoted to teaching implications.

Language and Woman's Place

Language and Woman's Place
Author: Robin Tolmach Lakoff
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 324
Release: 2004-07-22
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 019534717X

The 1975 publication of Robin Tolmach Lakoff's Language and Woman's Place, is widely recognized as having inaugurated feminist research on the relationship between language and gender, touching off a remarkable response among language scholars, feminists, and general readers. For the past thirty years, scholars of language and gender have been debating and developing Lakoff's initial observations. Arguing that language is fundamental to gender inequality, Lakoff pointed to two areas in which inequalities can be found: Language used about women, such as the asymmetries between seemingly parallel terms like master and mistress, and language used by women, which places women in a double bind between being appropriately feminine and being fully human. Lakoff's central argument that "women's language" expresses powerlessness triggered a controversy that continues to this day. The revised and expanded edition presents the full text of the original first edition, along with an introduction and annotations by Lakoff in which she reflects on the text a quarter century later and expands on some of the most widely discussed issues it raises. The volume also brings together commentaries from twenty-six leading scholars of language, gender, and sexuality, within linguistics, anthropology, modern languages, education, information sciences, and other disciplines. The commentaries discuss the book's contribution to feminist research on language and explore its ongoing relevance for scholarship in the field. This new edition of Language and Woman's Place not only makes available once again the pioneering text of feminist linguistics; just as important, it places the text in the context of contemporary feminist and gender theory for a new generation of readers.

Hedging in Academic Writing

Hedging in Academic Writing
Author: Angela Gräßer
Publisher: GRIN Verlag
Total Pages: 55
Release: 2014-02-13
Genre: Literary Collections
ISBN: 3656593671

Examination Thesis from the year 2013 in the subject English Language and Literature Studies - Linguistics, grade: 1,0, University of Augsburg, language: English, abstract: Hedging, ein Begriff der jüngeren Sprachwissenschaft, der sich sowohl auf semantisch-kognitive wie pragmatische Mittel und Strategien des Sich-nicht-festlegen-wollens oder -könnens bezieht, wird in der vorliegenden Studie als interpersonale Textstrategie verstanden, die den Restriktionen der, so die These, in den beiden untersuchten Sprachgemeinschaften geltenden tradierten Normen unterliegt. [...] Die thesengeleitete Untersuchung der 10 englischen und 10 spanischen linguistischen Fachaufsätze [...] führen zu erwartbaren, aber auch unerwarteten Ergebnissen. Unterschiede sind vor allem in Bezug auf den Grad der interpersonal-kooperativen Ausrichtung auf den Rezipienten zu konstatieren. Anglophone SchreiberInnen wenden sich häufiger unmittelbar an ihre LeserInnen, indem sie beispielsweise direkter auf sich selber als AutorInnen verweisen, während in den spanischen Texten nicht vorwiegend, aber doch auffällig oft unpersönliche Konstruktionen, einschließlich des pronominalen pluralis modestiae auftreten. Insofern bestätigt sich die eingangs aufgestellte Hypothese, dass AutorInnen dieses Kulturkreises "more conservative" sind. Allerdings, auch das zeigen die empirischen Befunde, ist eine Annäherung an die anglophonen Konventionen des hedging in den spanischen akademischen Publikationen nicht zu übersehen. Vorsichtig, aber sofort einsichtig formuliert die Verfasserin daher abschließend: "[It] may be true that the overwhelming influx of the English language in nearly every realm of academic discourse has indeed altered the conventions in 'academic' Spanish" (S. 41). (Auszug aus dem Gutachten der Zulassungsarbeit; ausgestellt von Prof. Dr. Wolfram Bublitz)

Culture and Styles of Academic Discourse

Culture and Styles of Academic Discourse
Author: Anna Duszak
Publisher: Walter de Gruyter
Total Pages: 373
Release: 2011-06-24
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 3110821044

TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS is a series of books that open new perspectives in our understanding of language. The series publishes state-of-the-art work on core areas of linguistics across theoretical frameworks as well as studies that provide new insights by building bridges to neighbouring fields such as neuroscience and cognitive science. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS considers itself a forum for cutting-edge research based on solid empirical data on language in its various manifestations, including sign languages. It regards linguistic variation in its synchronic and diachronic dimensions as well as in its social contexts as important sources of insight for a better understanding of the design of linguistic systems and the ecology and evolution of language. TRENDS IN LINGUISTICS publishes monographs and outstanding dissertations as well as edited volumes, which provide the opportunity to address controversial topics from different empirical and theoretical viewpoints. High quality standards are ensured through anonymous reviewing.

Women, Men and Everyday Talk

Women, Men and Everyday Talk
Author: J. Coates
Publisher: Springer
Total Pages: 327
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 113731494X

Bringing together a selection of some of the author's key papers on language and gender, this book provides an overview of the development of language and gender studies over the last 30 years, with particular emphasis on conversational data and on single sex friendship groups.

Perspectives in Politics and Discourse

Perspectives in Politics and Discourse
Author: Urszula Okulska
Publisher: John Benjamins Publishing
Total Pages: 429
Release: 2010
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 9027206279

The volume explores the vast and heterogeneous territory of Political Linguistics, structuring and developing its concepts, themes and methodologies into combined and coherent Analysis of Political Discourse (APD). Dealing with an extensive and representative variety of topics and domains - political rhetoric, mediatized communication, ideology, politics of language choice, etc. - it offers uniquely systematic, theoretically grounded insights in how language is used to perform power-enforcing/imbuing practices in social interaction, and how it is deployed for communicating decisions concerning language itself. The twenty chapters in the volume, written by specialists in political linguistics, (critical) discourse analysis, pragmatics, sociolinguistics, and social psychology, address the diversity of political discourse to propose novel perspectives from which common analytic procedures can be drawn and followed. The volume is thus an essential resource for anyone looking for a coherent research agenda in explorations of political discourse as a point of reference for their own academic activities, both scholarly and didactic. "Politics in today's world consists of almost continuous interconnected talking and writing in a constantly expanding media universe. This comprehensive collection of papers edited by Urszula Okulska and Piotr Cap helps readers to get a hold on the flow of discourse that constitutes politics today. Indispensible for anyone seeking perspectives for understanding the language of politics and research methods for probing beyond the surface."

Academic Discourse across Cultures

Academic Discourse across Cultures
Author: Igor Lakić
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 205
Release: 2015-09-10
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 1443882372

Academic discourse has recently become a blooming field of research for linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis, as well as pragmatics. The methodology and conventions employed in academic discourse, however, vary across cultures to a certain degree, and often represent obstacles for publishing in international journals for authors whose native language is not English, as top journals tend to centre on the Anglo-Saxon academic writing norms. This is one of the major reasons why national academic discourses need to be linguistically profiled and studied and contrastively compared against these norms. This volume contributes to this very objective by shedding light on academic discourse as effectuated in various, mostly Balkan countries, and contrasts it against the corresponding western, English discourse. Furthermore, academic discourse is studied through a variety of genres it can assume, such as research articles, conference proceedings, and university lectures. Through exploring the cultural differences in academic discourse and the standards of international academic writing, this volume offers readers a chance to become better equipped in publishing abroad. Opening with a chapter focusing on the general structure of research articles and national writing habits as a potential hindrance to publishing abroad, the book goes on to study the rhetorical structure of the abstracts, introductions and conclusions of research articles in linguistics, economics and civil engineering. The second part of the book deals with hedging, contrastively studied in international and national journals, with the following chapters studying cohesion as accomplished in academic writing. Part three deals with the syntactic and semantic features of academic discourse. This book will be of particular interest to linguists interested in genre and discourse analysis in general and academic discourse, and will also appeal to scholars from other research backgrounds wishing to familiarise themselves with international and national academic conventions, and thus overcome the hurdles relating to academic writing conventions when publishing abroad.