HEDGING AND BOOSTING STRATEGIES IN ALBANIAN NEWSPAPER OPINION PIECES FOR DIALOGICAL COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES
HEDGING AND BOOSTING STRATEGIES IN ALBANIAN NEWSPAPER OPINION PIECES FOR DIALOGICAL COMMUNICATIVE PURPOSES

Summary/Abstract: This paper focuses on the use of hedges and boosters as interactional metadiscoursal devices in Albanian newspaper opinion pieces. More specifically, I attempt to investigate their role in the realm of dialogical communication in these articles and how their writers engage readers in informative and persuasive processes. Based on Hyland’s interpersonal model of metadiscourse (2005), this study looks into both of these strategies and some very common hedging and boosting items/phases in a small specialized corpus. The quantitative and qualitative analyses in the second part of the present article discuss general issues related to this topic, but also concentrate on differences and similarities between texts written by male and female writes. Several illustrations support my observations and contextualize these devices in silent dialogues between interlocutors for communicative and persuasive purposes. The last part includes some tentative remarks, potential suggestions, but also some limitations in this study.

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