Hedging Through the Use of Modal Auxiliaries in English Academic Discourse

Hardjanto, Tofan Dwi

doi:10.22146/jh.v28i1.11412

Cited by 19 publications

(25 citation statements)

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“…In text analysis, frequency holds a salient role because each text might have its own lexical choice that results in different frequency of use (Biber, 2012). In this topic, Hardjanto (2016) has investigated the relation between text type and modal use. Although being in the same text type, Bonyadi (2011) figures out that there are different tendencies of modal use in news texts between two news media.…”

Section: A R T I C L E I N F O Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Although being in the same text type, Bonyadi (2011) figures out that there are different tendencies of modal use in news texts between two news media. Similarly, Hardjanto (2016) who investigates the use of modals in academic texts of five different fields (e.g. economics, linguistics, medicine, engineering, natural sciences) also describes that there are some slight differences in the choice of modals.…”

Section: A R T I C L E I N F O Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

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A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Oktavianti

Adnan

2020

Engl. Lang. Teach. Educational. Journal

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As one of the text categories, opinion texts have distinctive characteristics compared to any other texts in newspapers, including the choice of verb usage. This study then aims at preliminarily examining the verbs used in opinion articles in The Jakarta Post to find out the relation between frequency and text characteristics. This study collected the opinion articles of The Jakarta Post comprising 47.143 words. This study was assisted by Lancsbox to store the corpus of opinion section texts, to identify the verb lemmas, and to count the frequency of verbs. The verbs found in this study were then classified based on Scheibman’s main verb classification (which is based on Halliday’s and Dixon’s verb types). The results of the study show that there are three most frequent verb types used in opinion texts in The Jakarta Post; they are material, verbal, and feeling verb types. Meanwhile, the lesser frequent ones are perception, possessive/relational, relational, and cognition verbs types. Meanwhile, the least frequent verb types are existential, corporeal and perception/relational verbs types. As opinion text conveys the argument of the writer, it is plausible to find feeling verb type belongs to the third most frequent types, along with material type to show concrete actions and verbal type to report the information. These frequencies exhibit that there is a firm relationship between text characteristics and the tendency of verb choice.

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Section: A R T I C L E I N F O Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: A R T I C L E I N F O Abstractmentioning

confidence: 99%

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Oktavianti

Adnan

2020

Engl. Lang. Teach. Educational. Journal

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“…They are linguistics features used to determine the speakers' commitment to what they say or write and their sense of perceiving what others say or write (Fairclough, 2003). Hedging is concerning the fuzziness and certainty of the proposition while modality conveys the degree of certainty in a proposition (Hyland, 1996;Hardjanto, 2016). There is a strong relationship between hedges and modal verbs with respect to epistemic meanings conveying, politeness, obligation, and intention (Yunus, Suad, & Rashid, 2016).…”

Section: Modal Verbs Hedgingmentioning

confidence: 99%

Modal Verbs Hedging: The Uses and Functions of “Will” and “Shall” in Nigerian Legal Discourse

Bashir¹,

Yunus²,

Al-Jarrah³

2018

IJEL

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This is a corpus-based study on the uses and functions of modal verbs “will” and “shall” in the Nigerian legal discourse. It aims at examining their pragmatic functions as hedges in the legal discourse. It specifically aims to investigate how hedges are used in the legal texts to indicate precision and uncertainty. To achieve these objectives a specialised corpus was constructed which we named as “Nigerian Law Corpus” (NLC). The compilation of NLC is based on the Nigerian court proceedings and law reports. Hence, the compiled NLC corpus contains 546,313-word tokens. Meanwhile, reference corpus of law with 2.2 million word tokens based on the British National Corpus (BNC) is retrieved for comparison with NLC. To this end, two concordance tools were utilised to analyse the data of this study viz. “AntConc version 3.5” a semi-automated computer-aided tool and a web-based tool “Lextutor version 7”. Based on the frequency distribution the results revealed that model verb “will” featured in 493 instances in the NLC and 7,711 instances in the BNC Law, while, “shall” occurred at 401 instances in NLC and 1,348 instances in BNC Law. The results also indicated that “shall” was an overused element in NLC than in BNC Law with standardised concordance hits per million (NLC=734, BNC Law =589) while, “will” is the least used element of NLC (902 instances per million) compared to BNC Law (3,369 instances per million). The study also enumerated different semantic and pragmatic functions of “will” and “shall” in legal discourse, citing examples from both tag corpus (NLC) and reference corpus (BNC Law). Some of the functions as hedges (conveying a truth value of a proposition) are epistemic meanings: politeness, obligation, precision, duty, intention, and permission. In nutshell, the results indicated that “will” and “shall” are used by legal practitioners more especially lawyers in a courtroom to achieve precision in their argument in a case to persuade the court by showing the true value of commitment of the proposition.

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“…O'Grady (2017) further argues that I think is used to express either commitment to a proposition if it receives an intonational prominence or hesitation if it is followed by a filled pause. Some other studies examined modal (un)certainty in political radio interviews (Simon-Vandenbergen, 2000), linguistic devices of epistemic modality used in political statements to persuade the audience (Milkovich & Sitarica, 2017), modal auxiliary verbs as a means of persuasion and manipulation (Lillian, 2008;Hardjanto, 2016), various linguistic exponents used as a hedging strategy (Fraser, 2010) or as a stance-taking strategy (Hernández-Guerra, 2016) and degrees of commitment (Vukovic, 2014ab).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

“We believe in democracy…”: Epistemic Modality in Justin Trudeau’s Political Speeches

Hardjanto

Mazia

2019

Hum.

Self Cite

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This article investigates epistemic modality in political discourse. It focuses on modality markers in terms of their word classes, semantic meanings and discourse functions in political speeches. The data were taken from three speeches delivered by the 23rd Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. The results show that the markers found in the three speeches are of five different types, i.e., lexical verbs, modal adjectives, modal adverbs, modal auxiliary verbs and modal nouns, with meanings ranging from possibility, probability, to certainty. The markers also indicate the speaker’s commitment whose degree reflects the function in the social context. The speaker’s commitment is divided into three degrees of engagement, each of which serves as a means to be polite, to be diplomatic, and to be persuasive. The findings suggest that Trudeau tends to use reasonable judgment expressions to sound diplomatic and persuasive in his speeches.

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Hedging Through the Use of Modal Auxiliaries in English Academic Discourse

Cited by 19 publications

References 22 publications

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

A corpus study of verbs in opinion articles of The Jakarta Post and the relation with text characteristics

Modal Verbs Hedging: The Uses and Functions of “Will” and “Shall” in Nigerian Legal Discourse

“We believe in democracy…”: Epistemic Modality in Justin Trudeau’s Political Speeches

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