English Skills: Hedging Language
Swansea University
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MirQVuZsWEo

Transkript (automatisch erstellt)

0:00 [Music] so my name is joe and i teach english and academic skills to our international students here at swansea university so
0:08 hedging language um is sometimes called a careful language or cautious language and we use this to sort of show that we're not a hundred percent certain
0:19 about something you see there's a difference between facts and claims i mean a fact could be something like the sky is blue but a claim let's take for
0:29 example in a hundred years time most manual work will be done by machines now i'm pretty certain about that it's
0:39 quite likely most manual jobs will become automated but i'm not 100 sure so i need to use some special language to show this to the person reading my
0:49 writing so instead maybe we could say machines will probably perform most manual jobs in a hundred years time
1:01 probably is an adverb an adverb of certainty here saying that i think this is very possible you can also use starting phrases like it is likely that
1:13 or it is probable that these show again you're pretty certain about this future outcome there's actually so many different ways
1:22 to hedge in english think about those modal verbs that could and might um so you know machines could take most of the manual jobs could means
1:33 well i'm about 50 50. i'm not sure if they will i'm not sure if they won't of course with our machines or automation example we're quite certain
1:42 that it will happen what about if you're quite certain it won't happen something is unlikely there are hedging phrases again so you
1:50 could say um it is unlikely that or it is not possible that there are all sorts of phrases you can use to show that you really don't think something is going to
2:01 happen so for example um it is unlikely that dinosaurs will return well i hope so anyway my jew i think we've all seen jurassic park and we all know
2:12 that there is a small chance that it could happen right so i hope you enjoyed the video and if you want to find out more please check
2:23 out our channel and watch all of our videos and of course like and comment and you know ask your own questions [Music]