On Innocence and Experience: Modal Hedges in Health care Product Instructions in English and Serbian

Authors

  • Ivana Trbojević University of Belgrade, Serbia

Abstract

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 are equally strict in US, UK, Europe and Serbia.

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Published

2011-06-30

Issue

No. 3 (2011)

Section

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