Exploring Corporate Rhetoric in English: Hedging in Company Annual Reports - A Corpus-assisted Analysis #37620

Over the last twenty five years, much has been achieved by approaching the language of economics from different perspectives, from applied linguistics (Swales 1981, 1990; Hoey 1983) to literary theory, critical hermeneutics and the sociology of science. In these studies, two levels of analysis have been involved. The first level concerns economics writing in the wider context of academic writing, “to understand how far economics writing can be understood as part of an academic culture, and how far it can be understood only within the specific disciplinary culture of economics” (Dudley-Evans 1993: 9). Applied linguists and those interested in literary criticism and the study of genre have mainly answered these questions. The second level concerns economics writing as the discourse of practitioners who establish specialist vocabularies and technical conventions. Excerpt from Preface