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Hedging in Expert-Language Reviews

Preface


I Introduction
Hedging: A Challange for Pragmatics and Discourse Analysis

II Hegding Strategies in Academic Discourse
Abstract 1
Abstract 2
Abstract 3

III Interactive Aspects of Hedging
Abstract 1
Abstract 2
Abstract 3

IV Cross-cultural Aspects of Hedging
Abstract 1
Abstract 2
Abstract 3
Abstract 4

V Hedging: The Concept, its Origins and a Bibliographical Guide
Abstract 1
Abstract 2

Wolfram Wilss

 

Hedges are a fruitful field of research allowing insights into the text-strategic intricacies which are almost invariably apparent in communicative situations characterized by a more-or-less rather than by an all-or-nothing attitude. It is a moot question whether the description of classes of hedges should have priority over the analysis of individual occurrence, but we should remember that hedges are, at least to a considerable extent, systemic, schematic, semi-institutionalized in nature. Their properties are best discernible within an integrated approach and are adequately describable only in the context of their own functional system. It is this system which determines when hedges occur, how they will be recognized, what they may be combined with on the textual level, which patterns they follow, and generally, how they fit rhetorically into the organizational structure of a review.

 

Curriculum Vitae Wilss

 

Wolfram Wilss is a professor emeritus at the University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken, Germany. He studied German, English, Latin and Philosophy at Tübingen University and received his Ph. D. in 1950 in German Literature. Afterwards he visited the University of Reading (UK) as a lecturer in German language and literature, and Harvard as a machine translation scholar. Between 1966 and 1990 he was the director of the School for Translation and Interpretation of the University of the Saarland, Saarbrücken. His main fields of research are theoretical and applied aspects of translation, contemporary German language, and curricular issues. In 1989 he was awarded an honorary doctoral degree by the University of Economics at Aarhus, Denmark.