Hedging in Academic Texts: a Cross-Linguistic Comparison between English and Galician

Abstract

[Abstract] This final dissertation offers an approach to the concept of hedging and its socio-pragmatic implications with three different aims. First, it attempts to shed some light on this linguistic strategy, whose ubiquitous presence in both oral and written contexts may still go unnoticed by most people. Secondly –and mainly, given the line of research that has been chosen for this end of degree project–, it aims at carrying out a quantitative and qualitative cross-linguistic comparison between English and Galician regarding hedging in the particular field of academic writing, while simultaneously providing the reader with some insight into how this phenomenon shows up in the second language –where it has hardly been studied. Lastly, this study tries to test whether the repeated claim that women hedge more than men is verified within the compiled corpus of study and whether the figures in terms of gender differences in attenuation are similar for both languages.