Self-accessing the library

Independent task for MICASE

Leave this window open and type your answers and comments as you proceed. Make sure not to close the window before having sent its contents to your e-mail.

In this self-access task, you are invited to complete a series of practical exercises that reflect the corpus investigation skills you have acquired through the completion of previous exercises in the BNC/COCA and MICASE library sections. The following exercises, based on instructional material available on the MICASE corpus site, are about spoken academic language and require you to independently search the corpus for relevant examples. Please write your answers in the log and remember to also include reflective comments and take notes of the types of searches you executed and the problems you encounter.

 

Hedges in Spoken Academic Language

Hedges are fixed phrases that soften an opinion or criticism or simply make a comment more polite, and very frequently used in academic speech.

In the MICASE section entitled Instructional Materials: ESL Self-Study, the authors of the corpus present the following examples of hedging devices:

in a sense in some sense
in a way more or less
kind of like as far as I know
it seems to me it seems like
I feel like you could say

Source: http://www.lsa.umich.edu/eli/micase/ESL/FormulaicExpression/Definition.htm


As you perhaps remember from the MICASE section, hedging in spoken academic language is used to
1. express fuzziness, inexactitude (for example, if the following word is not the exact or best word to express an idea)
2.express uncertainty (lack of or decreased commitment to a proposition)
3. soften a stance or opinion (further qualifies or modifies the statement)
4. mitigate a criticism or request
5. introduce sophisticated vocabulary or jargon words
6. introduce metaphors
7. fill pauses

(adopted from Simpson, Rita. 2000. Hedges in Spoken Academic Language:
Pragmatic Functions and Teaching Applications. University of Michigan, English Language Institute)

Task A

For the following searches, we suggest that you limit the search results by setting the speech event type to either ‘Dissertation Defense’ or ‘Student Presentation’.

1. Search the MICASE corpus for occurrences of five of the ten phrases listed in the table above and familiarize yourself with the phrases by reading the full utterance and, if necessary, more of the transcript. Give the examples in the box below.


2. Give at least three conclusive examples each of how speakers use hedging to

a. express uncertainty, fuzziness or inexactitude
b. soften a stance or opinion
c. mitigate a criticism or request

3. Can you think of three other hedging expressions that are not in the table above and that could also be used in spoken academic language? Give examples from the corpus.


Task B

Extract 1
Title: Rehabilitation Engineering and Technology
Academic Division: Physical Sciences and Engineering
Discourse Mode: Lecture
File ID: LES165JG121

S1: uhuh, yeah, i see, that can be hard to generate on a communication system. they actually have communication systems that will be set up with just you know a one button, that would generate randomized different, uhuh, okay, mm, you know. these kind of continuation, sounds. because they are, they serve an important role, in our, society. and you don't always want to be saying, the exactly the same thing but at the same time, i would want to be careful that there weren't any, in my, randomized loop that were very strong affirmative agreements. because sometimes i don't agree with what the person is saying at all but i feel like i'm supposed to make some sound, so that they know i'm still on the phone or, whatever. um, you find that in conversation with people who can't produce speech at this, hundred and fifty to hundred and seventy-five words a minute or, whatever i'm talking at, that, they'll use telegraphic speech. so speech that's very much like if you see the old movies where they're reading a telegram, you know, arrived, six stop, you just put the most important words in there and, the ones that convey the actual, meaning, and leave out all the little ones that make it sound smooth. Um […]

Extract 2
Title: Multicultural Issues in Education Student Presentations
Academic Division: Social Sciences and Education
Discourse Mode: Panel
File ID: STP285SU013

[…] and it's obvious from, just those three things what they're trying t- they're they're um, i mean they're associating, um women, female sexuality, even uh, sports and um, alcohol. um, and while i while it seems simplistic i think the ad combines a lot of, gender and sexuality messages in an interesting way, um, to me it seems like by associating sports and women, um with beer um they're trying to attract the consumers that they feel will buy, that's reading the magazine that's gonna buy their product, a male heterosexual, um who likes sports, um, and, i- or by associating those all together and putting them in a group it seems to me that they were, they were trying to put all those things together things that, i should, necessarily have, or want, as a as an individual um, and i thought that, that kind of conflicted wh- of the assumptions that i have of myself, in my own, the way i looked at my lifestyle. it seemed to me uh like a presh- uh, i saw the ad as like a pressure on my, my social lifestyle, in a way because it reinforced, like these things that i should necessarily have, like female companionship maybe, and, and maybe when i don't, if i didn't, that'd be um, i could feel incomplete because, they're listing these things all together um, and i also thought that, in a way it degraded women in a way by just lumping them into this category as being, possessions maybe, because sports, beer, those are things that, well they feel that men, um, want or like. um, and i thought it put, it was telling me what all men have, these three things, um, and i thought that it was kind of lumping me, into this category of all men, um, and, that's how i, that's how i saw that. […]


Read the preceding two passages (Extracts 1 and 2)and spot all the hedges that you can. List them in the textbox below. Discuss also what functions they might be fulfilling. Do they sound natural and meaningful, or are they distracting or unnecessary?

 

Task C

Extract 3
Title: Bilingualism Student Presentations
Academic Division: Humanities and Arts
Discourse Mode: Panel
File ID: STP355MG011

S5 i'm concentrated on bilingualism and other language contact phenomena. um, how do i start this um (P :05) let me tell you why i'm interested in this um, first thing um, let's see i um, did a lot of the course work at U-C-L-A on uh American Indian studies. so that's my specialties, um North American Indian studies. and um, i also_ my dissertation interest is in the Andean, um, Andean studies, and um one of the things I wanted to find out was um, what happens in borderland situations in terms of language and culture. and i noticed that um, i had not done a lot of research in this particular area. i was thinking about doing, my r- my my my um presentation on on Andean bilingualism but i said, i have a lot of time to do (that if i want,) so um what i'm concentrating on is um uh the Pueblo um cultures of the Southwest. and i'm including the Navajos um, separately because they're not from from the Southwest they came from the north. um and they've been around for um... thousands of years um and it's extremely controversial uh in terms of that but they- they're they know themselves (xx) and others know them as not being from there. in terms of the Pueblos, they've been they've been there in terms of their archeological records since um, fifteen hundred years. and um, they've been in (in,) and they and in terms of the contemp- contemporary geogr- geographic locations of these people, you have to look at, um Arizona New Mexico, Utah, um, what else is the Southwest?

1. Re-word the preceding passage (Extract 3) by inserting hedges where you feel they would sound natural and meaningful.

2. Now read the passage out loud. What is the effect of the original as compared with the re-worded version?

 

Task D

Based on the previous exercises, please summarize your experiences with hedging in spoken academic language. What are your observations about frequency and variety of hedging devices in academic discourse? In what situation would you as a learner of academic English feel confident to use hedging expressions?

When you have provided your answers, enter your e-mail address in the assigned field and save your answers by sending them to yourself. Make sure that the e-mail address is correct before clicking the Send button!