1 / 5

Modality and hedging

Modality and hedging. Verbal modality 1.«concerns with the speaker’s assumptions or assessment of possibilities» (what the speaker/writer thinks possible or states as possible) 2. Indicates the degree of confidence (or lack of confidence) the speaker has in their statement.

ravi
Download Presentation

Modality and hedging

An Image/Link below is provided (as is) to download presentation Download Policy: Content on the Website is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use and may not be sold / licensed / shared on other websites without getting consent from its author. Content is provided to you AS IS for your information and personal use only. Download presentation by click this link. While downloading, if for some reason you are not able to download a presentation, the publisher may have deleted the file from their server. During download, if you can't get a presentation, the file might be deleted by the publisher.

E N D

Presentation Transcript

  1. Modality and hedging Verbal modality 1.«concerns with the speaker’s assumptions or assessment of possibilities» (what the speaker/writer thinks possible or states as possible) 2. Indicates the degree of confidence (or lack of confidence) the speaker has in their statement. 3. Shows the status of the speaker’s understanding or knowledge

  2. 4. Weak epistemic modality (may) suggests a lower level of commitment to the truth value of a statement 5. Strong epistemic modality (must) suggests a higher level of commitment

  3. hedging Expression of speculative statementsasopposed to factuallanguage Way to express absence of certainty Strategic desire not to be toocategorical Hedgingestablishes the acceptability of the contribution by the scientific community. Acceptabilitylargelydepends on the respect of sharedformalrules (rhetoricaldevices in use within the research community = grammar of politeness)

  4. How to detecthedging: surfacetextualfeatures cognitive verbs such as think, believe, suppose, reckon plausibility shields, in particular appear, seem. They give further emphasis to the epistemic verbs (verbs relating to knowledge) constituting the traditional hedges, such as suggest, imply, speculate, indicate; cues, such as perhaps, maybe, although; modal adjectives such as likely, possible, consistent with, downtoners (barely, nearly, slightly) adverbial forms of the type quite, almost, usually, probably, etc. lexical verbs conveying the idea of modality: indicate, suggest, propose, advise

  5. approximators (or “rounders” in Prince 1982) of quantity, degree, frequency, and time, such as approximately, roughly, somewhat, quite, often, occasionally; emotionally charged intensifiers: extremely, particularly, unexpectedly, surprisingly The passive existential subjects (there+verb+nominal group)

More Related