Hedging In Economics Texts Written By Native English Speakers

This thesis is a study of hedging in economics texts written by native English speakers. The notion has been in the linguistic vocabulary since the ternl was introduced by Lakoff (1972) to describe ords whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy? Hedging is one part of epistemic modality; it indicates an unwillingness to make an explicit and complete commitment to the truth value of proposition. In the field of academic writing, it is important to become familiar with relevant discourse conventions and learn to operate with them. By analyzing economics texts, statistical results concerning the relative frequencies and distributional information of hedging items are given. The results are useful in that they show how and why hedged expressions in economics texts. Texts written by Chinese are quite different in respect of hedging. I don't think this is good because the economics articles written by Chinese are supposed to be read by foreigners and have the task to introduce China to outside world. So Chinese economists should write in the ainstream?manner welcomed by foreigners. This thesis proposes methods to teach hedging to ESP students who are supposed to write on economics in the future.