SOFTENING THE WORDS OF CRISIS: HEDGING IN ECONOMICS – RELATED ARTICLES PUBLISHED ON THE INTERNET

In applied linguistics the ability of being intentionally vague has been recognized as a crucial component of communicative competence. Vagueness can be achieved through hedging, a technique widely used in a wide variety of disciplinary discourses including the economic discourse. The objective of this work is to analyse articles on the World Economic Crisis published on the Internet and determine whether the authors writing about the crisis use hedging. When writing about issues which may lead to controversial reactions, writers tend to be cautious, softening their own claims when they feel uncertain of the facts they present.

Key words: hedging, the World Economic Crisis, the Internet, genre-analysis, corpus-based analysis