Hedges and boosters in biomedical research papers: a classification proposal for English/Spanish contrastive studies

Resumen

Utterance modifiers have aroused the interest of English linguists since Lakoff coined the term 'hedge' in 1972. Far from that first semantic approach, nowadays hedges and boosters are mostly studied from a pragmatic point of view. This means that these linguistic units should not be considered as a limited set of lexical forms, but rather as a contextual phenomenon. In addition, oral discourse has also given way to written scientific discourse along this time. Despite this boom in English research, Spanish literature on this topic is extremely limited. In fact, most works on hedging written by Spanish authors merely analysed English texts. Furthermore, if they ever deal with Spanish texts, their results are usually rendered in English. Thus, hedges and boosters represent a terminological and conceptual gap in Spanish. To fill this gap, this paper proposes an attempt to classify these units. Particularly, our aim is to hint tentative guidelines for an English- Spanish contrastive study of utterance modifiers in the biomedical research article. This genre will illustrate our proposal for both languages