The analysis of hedges in medical scientific articles – a contrastive German-Portuguese study
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.34624/rual.v0i11.35809Keywords:
Hedges, Contrastive study German‑Portuguese, Scientific article, Comparable corpusAbstract
Hedges have been in the focus of research in Languages for Special Purposes (LSP) over the last decades, being an integral part of scientific discourse. In the present article, we address the contrastive analysis of hedges in German and Portuguese scientific articles in the medical field. The aim of this study is to contribute to a systematisation of the categories of hedges, which still constitute a research gap in this language pair. Based on the categorisation of hedges proposed by Salager‑Meyer (1994, 1995) for medical articles in the English language, we present a framework, which was used to identify and extract the occurrences of hedges in both corpora. The contrastive study was carried out using comparable corpora of twenty scientific articles belonging to each of the respective languages. The corpora analysis was carried out with AntConc version 4.1.1 (Anthony, 2022), by means of which the most representative hedges were identified in the selected texts, according to the previously established categories: (1) Hedges, (2) Approximators, (3) Expressions of doubt, and (4) Compound hedges. For each of these categories, hedges were contrasted in both languages in order to draw conclusions about the use of attenuation in medical articles. The category of compound hedges proved particularly interesting for future studies, given its complexity and difficult delimitation.
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Programas informáticos
ANTHONY, L. (2022). AntConc (Version 4.1.1) [Computer Software]. Tokyo, Japan: Waseda University [https://www.laurenceanthony.net/software/antconc/]
