Browsing by Subject "Hedges"

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    Adverbial hedges in university students' oral performance: a cross-language Multidimensional Analysis.
    (Editum. Servicio de Publicaciones de la Universidad de Murcia, 2008) Pérez Paredes, Pascual F.; Sánchez Hernández, Purificación; Aguado Jiménez, Pilar; Criado, Raquel; Filología Inglesa
    In this paper we set out to examine the natural, non-elicited, occurrence of adverbial hedges in the production of (a) Spanish learners of EAP and (b) British students of Modern Languages. Our research is based on three premises. First, it is data-driven. Our corpora are made up of interviews which were conducted following the same methodology and mirroring the tasks in the LINDSEI oral corpus. Second, linguistically it builds on Biber (1988) and Biber, Conrad, Reppen, Byrd and Helt (2002) Multidimensional Analysis of language, which holds that there is a tendency for linguistic features of morpho-syntactic and semantic nature to cluster together around dimensions of use. Finally, it is cross-linguistic, as we present a comparison between the productions of different speakers performing exactly the same communicative tasks. Results show important differences in the frequency of use as well as in the contexts of use of adverbial hedges in these two comparable communities of use. The discussion offers insights into the interplay between quantitative research methodology for language analysis and pedagogical concerns. ----------------------------