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Philology. Theory & Practice
  • Original research article
  • March 10, 2019
  • Open access

LEXICAL HEDGES IN THE BRITISH AND AMERICAN VARIETIES OF ACADEMIC DISCOURSE IN ECONOMICS: A CORPUS-BASED STUDY

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Abstract

In the article, the results of a corpus-based study of lexical hedging devices in 100 British and 100 American research article abstracts published in recent years in five leading scholarly journals in economics are presented. The study shows no statistically significant differences in the frequency of lexical hedges used by the British and American authors, suggesting that the Anglo-American academic discourse in economics is quite homogeneous as far as the abstract genre is concerned. A frequency list of lexical hedges presented in the paper can be used in EAP and ESP courses as well as in further research.

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Author information

Margarita Vladimirovna Mikolaichik

V. I. Vernadsky Crimean Federal University

About this article

Publication history

  • Received: January 18, 2019.
  • Published: March 10, 2019.

Keywords

  • академический дискурс
  • американский английский
  • аннотация
  • британский английский
  • вариативность
  • корпус
  • лексические загородки
  • хеджи
  • хеджинг
  • хеджирование
  • частотность
  • academic discourse
  • American English
  • abstract
  • British English
  • variation
  • corpus
  • lexical hedges
  • hedges
  • hedging
  • frequency

Copyright

© 2019 The Author(s)
© 2019 Gramota Publishing, LLC

User license

Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)