Modal hedges in para-pharmaceutical product instructions: some examples from English and Serbian

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 i...

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Detalles Bibliográficos
Autor: Trbojevic Milosevic, Ivana
Tipo de recurso: artículo
Fecha de publicación:2012
País:España
Repositorio:accedaCRIS portal de investigación de la Universidad de las Palmas de Gran Canaria
OAI Identifier:oai:accedacris.ulpgc.es:10553/11200
Acceso en línea:http://hdl.handle.net/10553/11200
Access Level:acceso abierto
Palabra clave:570107 Lengua y literatura
550510 Filología
Descripción
Sumario: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 seem to be equally strict in US, UK and Commonwealth, Europe and Serbia.