To hedge or not to hedge: the use of epistemic modal expressions in popular science in English texts, English–German translations, and German original texts

Kranich, Svenja

doi:10.1515/text.2011.004

Cited by 52 publications

(29 citation statements)

References 5 publications

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“…"Together they offer the writer a chance to either expand the dialogue by opening up an argument to different viewpoints or contract it by closing off other voices" (Hyland 2014: 5). The use of hedges in academic and popular scientific discourse has been studied by a number of authors, e.g., Varttala (2001), Lewin (2005), Vold (2006), Kranich (2011), Hyland (2014, but none of them has focused on epistemic adverbs as a class. They tend to take specific properties of academic discourse as their starting point and identify the devices by means of which those properties are manifested.…”

Section: Epistemic Adverbs In Academic Discourse: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverbial Markers of Epistemic Modality Across Disciplinary Discourses: A Contrastive Study of Research Articles in Six Academic Disciplines

Rozumko

2017

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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Epistemic adverbs, like other markers of epistemic modality, are concerned with the speaker's assessment of the truth value of the proposition. In other words, they indicate that the speaker considers certain situations as possible, impossible, probable, certain, or uncertain. At the same time, they signal the author's presence in the text, and invite the reader to make his/her own conclusions and interpretations. The use of modal markers has been demonstrated to differ across academic disciplines, but the specific differences concerning the use of epistemic adverbs have not been studied systematically. This paper investigates the use of epistemic adverbs in research articles representing six disciplines belonging to three different branches of science: the humanities (linguistics and literary studies), the social sciences (law and sociology), and the natural sciences (physics and medicine), with the aim of establishing discipline-specific tendencies in their use. The study is based on a corpus of 160 research articles compiled by the author. It begins with an attempt at delimiting the category of epistemic adverbs in English. After that, a list of the most frequent epistemic adverbs in the subcorpora of all the disciplines is established and discussed. The study demonstrates that frequent use of epistemic adverbs is largely a property of research articles in the humanities and social sciences. Medical and physics research articles use them significantly less often. The most frequent epistemic adverbs in the research articles under analysis include indeed,

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Section: Epistemic Adverbs In Academic Discourse: Related Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Adverbial Markers of Epistemic Modality Across Disciplinary Discourses: A Contrastive Study of Research Articles in Six Academic Disciplines

Rozumko

2017

Studia Anglica Posnaniensia

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“…In the context of translation studies, shifts in hedging have been examined in translations of a variety of genres, including scientific texts (Markkanen and Schröder, 1989), political texts (Schäffner, 1998) and popular science writing (Kranich, 2011). While not specifically focusing on hedging, Gumul's (2011) analysis of changes in the translations of English-language newspaper articles on the conflict in Iraq published in a Polish magazine reveals that shifts in epistemic modality contribute to an altered point of view of the target text.…”

Section: Hedging In Journalistic Discoursementioning

confidence: 99%

Translating hedging devices in news discourse

Peterlin

Moe

2016

Journal of Pragmatics

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“…"In recent years, attention seems to have shifted away from the role of hedging in oral discourse, a topic prevailing in much of the literature on hedging in the eighties, to hedging in academic discourse" (Meyer 1997:21). Indeed, the shift has been continuing from the focus of hedging in oral discourse in the 1980s (Hübler 1983;Hosman1989), to the focus on academic discourse in the 1990s (Salager-Meyer 1994;Hyland 1996aHyland , 1996bMeyer 1997), and most recently to hedging in translation studies (Auwera 2005;Kranich 2009Kranich , 2011Peterlin 2010;Hu and Cao 2011) and interpreting studies (Monacelli 2006;Liu 2010;Sun 2014).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gender difference of hedging in interpreting for chinese government press conferences: A corpus-based study

Pan

Zheng

2017

Across Languages and Cultures

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This paper aims to examine gender differences in hedging in Chinese–English conference interpreting based on a transcribed parallel corpus. The point of departure was to test Holmes’s (1986, 1988a) claims that women do not necessarily employ more hedges than men but that women’s use of hedges tends to focus more on interpersonal relationships while men’s is more on propositional precision. Hyland’s (1996a, 1996b) model in which hedges were categorized into accuracy-oriented, speaker-oriented and audience-oriented, has been adapted for this end. Our finding shows that male interpreters actually employ more hedges than their female counterparts on the whole. In particular, their accuracy-oriented and speaker-oriented hedges exceed those of female interpreters, but not for audience-oriented ones. To find out whether these differences were caused by the source texts per se or by interpreters’ manipulation, we named four types of interpreting approach towards hedge items: direct transfer, indirect transfer, shift and addition. The former two types were identified as source text interference while the latter two as interpreters’ manipulation. The results indicate that male interpreters exceed female interpreters in terms of shift and addition cases in all three types of hedges. The findings of the present study contribute to a more profound understanding of gender difference in language mediation and also have implications for future interpreter training.

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To hedge or not to hedge: the use of epistemic modal expressions in popular science in English texts, English–German translations, and German original texts

Cited by 52 publications

References 5 publications

Adverbial Markers of Epistemic Modality Across Disciplinary Discourses: A Contrastive Study of Research Articles in Six Academic Disciplines

Adverbial Markers of Epistemic Modality Across Disciplinary Discourses: A Contrastive Study of Research Articles in Six Academic Disciplines

Translating hedging devices in news discourse

Gender difference of hedging in interpreting for chinese government press conferences: A corpus-based study

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