On Innocence and Experience: Modal Hedges in Health Care Product Instructions in English and Serbian
On Innocence and Experience: Modal Hedges in Health Care Product Instructions in English and Serbian
Author(s): Ivana Trbojević MiloševićSubject(s): Language and Literature Studies, Syntax, South Slavic Languages, Philology
Published by: Филолошки факултет Универзитета у Бањој Луци
Keywords: Consumer health care product description; epistemic modality; expressions of procedural meaning; hedges; modal verbs;
Summary/Abstract: The paper investigates how modal hedges (Coates 1983) understood as expressions of procedural meaning, i.e. expressions which instruct the addressee/reader how to process the propositional content of an utterance/statement (Watts 2004) are used in product descriptions, advertisements and consumer instructions leaflets for a number of products belonging to the Consumer Health Care category for the purposes of complying with consumer protection laws on the one hand and serving as an implicit disclaimer of manufacturer’s responsibility on the other. The analysis is carried out contrastively for two languages, English and Serbian. The results obtained are discussed and viewed as a matter of cultural variety and difference, especially taking into consideration the fact that consumer protection laws are equally strict in US, UK, Europe and Serbia.
Journal: Филолог – часопис за језик, књижевност и културу
- Issue Year: 2011
- Issue No: 3
- Page Range: 131-140
- Page Count: 10
- Language: English