no / The acoustical effects of hedges result from a combination of physical noise reduction and their influences on perception. This study investigates the physical noise reduction so as to enable estimation of its relative importance. Different in-situ methods have been used to measure noise shielding by hedges. These include a statistical pass-by experiment where the real insertion loss of a hedge could be measured, three controlled pass-by experiments using a reference microphone at close distance, and transmission loss measurements using a point source. Thick dense hedges are found to provide only a small total A-weighted light vehicle noise reduction at low speeds. Measured insertion losses range from 1.1 dBA to 3.6 dBA. The higher noise reductions are found to be associated with an increased ground effect.

This study investigates how hedges are used in an American popular science text about the effects of climate change and to what extent their translation to Swedish is retained or modified concerning modal strength. Furthermore, the study seeks to explain the reasons behind translation choices, which affect the level of modal strength and or linguistics alterations in the target text. The method is both quantitative, where the instances of hedging in the source text are counted and categorized, and qualitative, where potential factors affecting the translation choices are analyzed and interpreted. The results of the study show that hedging devices for the most are retained in translation concerning modal strength. However, an exception is the English modal verb may where the modal strength in six out of eight instances is higher in the target text than in the source text. This study suggests that the vague meaning of modal verbs and the fact that Swedish does not have one apparent translation, with a similar grammatical pattern, could have affected the translation choices. Furthermore, linguistic and text conventional adaptions to the target language may be another factor affecting modifications.

Hedges, or hedging devices, are strategies that the writer or speaker can use in order to convey probability, impreciseness or vagueness. Hedges can appear in most parts of speech, for example as adjectives, adverbs or modal or lexical verbs. This study investigates the translation of hedging devices in a non-fiction text from English to Swedish. It also discusses the translation strategies used when rendering the hedging devices in the target language. The primary source of this study was a non-fictional academic text on American architectural history. The method consisted of identifying and categorizing the hedging devices of the source text and then identifying the manner in which they were translated. In the quantitative analysis, it was found that the most frequently used translation strategy was retention, i.e. literal translation, but modification and omission were also found. It was also determined that the target text used a slightly higher number of hedging devices, which could suggest a cross-cultural difference between the languages. The qualitative analysis, supported by corpora and parallel texts, found that modification occurred due to cross-cultural differences or translator preferences. Omission mainly occurred when multiple hedging devices appeared in the same sentence and the function of the omitted hedge could be inferred by the surrounding hedges.

Hecken unterscheiden sich in der Wuchshöhe, Laubfärbung, Blüte und Frucht. Sie werden als Sichtschutz, zur Einfassung von Beeten oder zur Begrenzung angepflanzt. Die Broschüre stellt unterschiedliche Heckensorten und ihre Verwendung vor und gibt Hinweise zu Pflege und Schnitt.

This study investigates the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters employed in L1 and L2 argumentative paragraphs written by Turkish learners of English with pre-intermediate level of proficiency. It aims to uncover whether or not Turkish learners of English writing in L1 and L2 display any transfer in their employment of hedges and boosters. The extent to which the academic writing teaching materials result in any measurable change in the employment of hedges and boosters is also pursued. To this end, the data that is comprised of 104 (52 Turkish and 52 English) argumentative paragraphs written as a response to a TOEFL essay prompt are collected. The analysis of the data is done manually and each paragraph is coded and formatted in CLAN CHILDES. Later, PASW is used to run the descriptive statistics and calculate the frequency and percentages of hedges and boosters. The results show that the types, frequencies, and meanings of hedges and boosters are culture and language-specific and they are topic and genre dependent. Research v findings also reveal that the participants in this study often express appropriate degree of certainty and pragmatic vagueness while writing in L1 and L2. However, there are some cases in which the evidence of rhetorical transfer are observed with respect to functions of certain hedges. The findings further indicate that there is a parallelism between the teaching materials used in academic writing classes and the types, frequencies and functions of hedges and boosters produced in L2 paragraphs.

The aim of this study was to analyze and compare the use of the verbal hedge "you know" in the spontaneous speech of women and drag queens to compare for instances of certainty and uncertainty as described by Holmes (1986). For the data, episodes of the reality shows RuPaul’s Drag Race Untucked which airs on Logo TV and The Real Housewives of Orange County which airs on Bravo TV were manually transcribed by the conventions of written speech. The use of "you know" was then analyzed by function and context. In the results of this study, the women used "you know" to express uncertainty more often than the drag queens, except not in the way Lakoff (2004) described as being an aspect of "women’s language." The drag queens used "you know" more often to express certainty. However, when used to express uncertainty its use by the drag queens was more relevant to "women’s language" as described by Lakoff (2004) or an exaggerated performance of femininity.

This study reexamines Lakoff’s (1973) claim that women use more hedges than men is true. Because of the vast number of hedges, this study focuses on two hedges: I think and I’m sure. It also investigates how the included hedges are used by men and women to express belief and opinion. The study has been carried out with the help of a corpus called British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014). From this database, authentic conversations that include these hedges in clause-final position have been extracted. By using the extracted and processed data, a conclusion can be drawn regarding similarities and differences in how often men and women use these hedges and in what context they are used. The results show that Lakoff’s (1973) claim has a certain truth to it, since 63.0% of the valid I think tokens and 67.6% of the valid I’m sure tokens were produced by women. As for the expression of belief or opinion, the results points towards I think and I’m sure upholding traditional gender traits.

Hecken unterscheiden sich in der Wuchshöhe, Laubfärbung, Blüte und Frucht. Sie werden als Sichtschutz, zur Einfassung von Beeten oder zur Begrenzung angepflanzt. Die Broschüre stellt unterschiedliche Heckensorten und ihre Verwendung vor und gibt Hinweise zu Pflege und Schnitt.

The aim of this essay is to investigate the claims made by Robin Lakoff regarding women’s language, where she claims that women use hedges more than men. The aim of this essay is to investigate whether this statement is true. To put it differently, this essay aims to look at gender differences in the use of modal adverbs as hedges. As a method, a frequency analysis has been conducted, where data from the British National Corpus 2014 (BNC2014) has been used. Since hedging involves various linguistic forms, this essay focuses on the modal adverbs presented by Huddleston and Pullum. The results show that women do use more hedges than men. Regardless, there are not any major dissimilarities across genders. Although there were some findings that supported Lakoff’s claims, there were also some that contradicted her claims.

This paper presents dilemmas that arose in the process of translation to Swedish of parts of a French book on children’s emotional development and parenting.  Three specific domains are discussed: 1) The choice of pronoun for child. A new genderneutral personal pronoun that has gained ground in Swedish in recent years presents a practical solution, but implies some editing in order not to be too salient and repetitive. 2) The relationship between author and readers created by an inclusive and personal language. 3) The need in the target text to add « hedges », a form of metadiscourse markers defined by Hyland (1998 :1) as « any linguistics means used to indicate either a) a lack of complete commitment to the truth value of the accompanying proposition, or b) a desire not to express that commitment categorically ».    The problems and the choices made have been put into the context of the functionalist approach to translation presented by Ingo (2007). The feelings of the target text readers have been in focus in all three instances of discussion and the need for translators to be aware of metadiscourse and rhetorical conventions have been explored.