| Keywords [eng] |
Hedged Performatives, Modal Verbs, Performative Verbs, Written Academic Discourse, Humanities, Medicine, Theory of Speech Acts, Illocutionary Force. |
| Abstract [eng] |
The present paper focuses on the pragmatic analysis of hedged performatives in British National Corpus (BNC), sub-corpora of written academic discourse of medicine (sub-corpus 1) and humanities (sub-corpus 2) to be exact. The aim of the thesis is to examine the contrast between the usage of hedged performatives in two distinct academic fields. Such angle was chosen due to the lack of previous analysis done on the pragmatic use of hedged performatives and their function in academic discourse. The following objectives were raised in order to accomplish the aim: 1. To identify high frequency hedged performatives in written academic discourse of medicine and humanities; 2. To define and investigate their functional profile and usage patterns; 3. To identify similarities and differences of the use of hedged performatives in written academic discourse of medicine and humanities. The methods for data selection mainly rely on the ‘hereby’ test (Austin, 1962). The test allows distinguishing whether a certain verb is a performative and if it qualifies to be included in the analysis of hedged performatives. The present thesis is a corpus-based study and qualitative, quantitative, and comparative research methods were used in order to achieve the aim of the thesis. After the analysis in BNC, there were 3,765 instances found, however, not all of them qualified to be included in the analysis. Omitted instances were direct quotations, instances where personal pronoun ‘we’ was used inclusively, and instances with verbs which are not performative. Thus, the total number of hedged performatives distinguished in both academic fields was 548: 83 instances in the field of medicine and 465 instances in the field of humanities. The data indicate that hedged performatives are not a frequent phenomenon neither in medicine nor in humanities. This pragmatic phenomenon can be more frequently found in sub-corpus 2 with 14.1 instances per 100,000 words while only 5.9 instances per 100,000 words in sub-corpus 1. Hedged performatives can be also classified according to the modal verbs used in the phrase and the meaning they might carry (Fraser, 1975). Accordingly, 5 distinct categories were distinguished. The analysis of most frequent performative verbs notes that these verbs are usually used similarly in both academic fields. The most frequent groups of verbs used to refer to the assured confirmation that a particular statement is true (claim, argue, etc.), to the act of supposing that a particular statement is probably true (predict, speculate, etc.), to identify distinct points of the claim (classify, list, etc.), and to express negative opinion or rejection (reject, object, etc.). These performative verbs were found in both fields of medicine and humanities. Finally, the three-part functional analysis was adapted to categorise the instances according to the pragmatic function they perform (Kaltenböck, 2019). The results demonstrate that in both academic around 51% of instances in both fields appear to have boosting function. The following function was shield (hedging) which comprises 48% in the field of medicine and 40% in the field of humanities, and discourse marking function comprises around 1% in the field of medicine and 9% in the field of humanities. After all aspects in the analysis were discussed, it was important to finally conduct a comparative analysis between two sub-corpora which confirms that not all modal verbs have the ability to collocate with performatives verbs equally well and due to this reason some modal verbs are less frequent than others. In general, the empirical analysis confirms that hedged performatives are less common in written academic discourse of medicine than in written academic discourse of humanities. |
