Hedging modal adverbs in Slovenian academic discourse

Lenardič, Jakob; Fišer, Darja

doi:10.4312/slo2.0.2021.1.145-180

Cited by 2 publications

(1 citation statement)

References 23 publications

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“…Hedging in academic discourse has been examined in a large number of works (Al-Khasawneh 2017, Alonso-Almeida 2014, Alward 2012, Aull & Lancaster 2014, Dontcheva-Navratilova 2016, Haufiku & Kangira 2018, Heng & Tan 2022, Hyland 1998, Kozubikova 2021, Lenardič & Fišer 2021, Petchkij 2019, Vassileva 2001. Varttala (2001) examined the status of hedging in popularized articles as opposed to research articles from three disciplines -economics, medicine, and technology.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Boginskaya

2022

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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The interactional nature of academic discourse has been analyzed in linguistics literature from different perspectives. However, these studies have been predominantly conducted on English materials. Little is known of how interactional metadiscourse elements are used in Russian academic prose and what diachronic changes in metadiscourse have occurred in the last decade. Building on previous research that suggests cross-linguistic, cross-cultural and diachronic differences in the use of hedges in academic prose, this paper explores functional categories of hedges used in Russian research article abstracts from a diachronic perspective. The main focus is on quantitative and qualitative variations in the functional realization of hedging, since it may be expected that it could change over time. The study was conducted on a corpus of 112 linguistics research article abstracts published in four Russian journals in two periods (2008-2014 and 2015-2021). To investigate hedging devices and their functional categories, this study employed quantitative and qualitative analyses. The quantitative analysis indicated that in the first period (2008-2014) hedging was most frequently realized through modals, reporting verbs, and quantifiers. In the second time span (2015-2021), reporting verbs, epistemic verbs, and adjectives of probability were among the most frequent functional categories of hedging. Overall, the distribution of functional categories of hedging changed in the second period when hedging was realized through a variety of lexical means belonging to different functional categories. In terms of the functions of hedging, the difference was also striking. In the first time span, hedges were employed to diminish an authorial presence in the text, while in the second one authors hedged to point toward possible methodological limitations and to signal inaccuracies of research results. Despite some data limitations, this study could be seen as a starting point for future research of metadiscourse in Russian-language academic prose from cross-disciplinary, cross-cultural or diachronic perspective.

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Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Boginskaya

2022

Russian Journal of Linguistics

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Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Slovenian Modality in Socially Unacceptable Facebook Comments

Lenardič,

Pahor de Maiti

2023

SLO2.0

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This paper investigates the grammatical and pragmatic uses of epistemic and deontic modal expressions in a corpus of Slovenian socially acceptable and unacceptable Facebook comments. We propose a set of modals that do not interpretatively vary in their modality type in order to enable robust corpus searches and reliable quantification of the results. We show that deontic, but not epistemic, modals are significantly more frequent in socially unacceptable comments, and specifically that they favour violent discourse. We complement the quantitative findings with a qualitative analysis of the discursive roles played by the modals. We explore how pragmatic communicative strategies such as hedging, boosting, and face-saving arise from the underlying syntactic and semantic properties of the modal expressions, such as the modal force and clausal syntax.

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Hedging modal adverbs in Slovenian academic discourse

Cited by 2 publications

References 23 publications

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Functional categories of hedges: A diachronic study of Russian research article abstracts

Grammatical and Pragmatic Aspects of Slovenian Modality in Socially Unacceptable Facebook Comments

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