As a communicative strategy, hedging plays a central role in academic writing. Numerous different linguistic forms can be used to express this strategy. This article attempts to investigate modal auxiliary verbs as the principal means of expressing hedging in English academic discourse. For this purpose, a corpus of 75 primary empirical research articles from economics, linguistics, medicine, natural sciences and engineering was analyzed quantitatively with the help of corpus linguistic method. The results revealed that modal auxiliaries were used most frequently in linguistics and economics and least frequently in engineering and natural sciences while their use in medicine came in between. This seems to suggest that there is noticeable disciplinary variation in the degree of hedging through the use of modal auxiliaries in English research articles. Modal auxiliaries tend to be more common in soft sciences than in hard sciences whereas their use in health sciences in comparison with soft and hard sciences does not seem to show any significant difference.
This research investigates assertive speech acts in Donald Trump’s presidential speeches. It classifies the assertive speech acts based on their illocutionary forces according to Bach and Harnish (1979). The data were taken from three speeches by Donald Trump. The results show that the illocutionary forces of assertive speech acts found in the speeches are affirming, alleging, asserting, avowing, claiming, declaring, denying, maintaining, propounding, saying, and stating. The act of stating is the most commonly used (44%). The findings suggest that Trump uses the act of stating mostly because he wants the hearer to believe him that the policies he has made are the best for the United States.
This study investigates the sarcastic utterances found in two American movies. The data for the research were dialogues containing sarcastic expressions found in the movies Fantastic Four (2005) and its sequel Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2008). The data were analyzed and categorized according to their forms using Camp’s theory (2011). The sarcastic utterances were also classified according to their functions using Leech’s theory (1983). The results indicate that in terms of form, illocutionary sarcasm (60%) was most frequently used by the characters in the movies, which suggests that the characters in the movies tend to express their sarcasm through illocutions. In terms of function, sarcasm in the movies was more commonly (56%) used for collaborative purposes. The results of the research also suggest that there has to be a clear context in understanding sarcastic expressions, and the interlocutors must share some sufficient common ground in employing sarcasm.
This research paper investigates the speech act of disagreement performed by English native speaker students. Particularly, it attempts to examine the politeness strategies used by English native speaker students in realizing disagreement. The data were obtained using Discourse Completion Task consisting of six situations that were completed by twenty students. The results showed that a total of 113 utterances of disagreement were found. The most frequently used strategy was negative politeness (41.6%) since this strategy becomes the most suitable strategy to minimize the imposition of disagreement utterances. The rank is then followed by positive politeness (29.2%), bald on-record (25.7%), and off-record (3.5%).
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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