Tag: (S) directness

(2012) English, Serbian – Modal hedges

Trbojević-Milošević, Ivana (2012). Modal hedges in para-pharmaceutical product instructions: Some examples from English and Serbian. Revista de lenguas para fines específicos, 18, 71-92. PDF (open access)

The paper investigates how modal hedges, understood as expressions of procedural meaning, i.e. expressions containing instructions for the addressee/reader on how to process the propositional content of an utterance/statement 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 seem to be equally strict in US, UK and Commonwealth, Europe and Serbia.


Sound application of NSM principles carried out without prior training by an experienced NSM practitioner

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(2002) Japanese, English – Indirectness

Asano, Yuko (2002). How to be indirect in Japanese – A cultural script approach. RASK (International Journal of Language and Communication), 17. 23-51. PDF (open access)

Although Japanese and English have a large variety of indirect expressions, they often use them in different proportions, which leads to different communicative styles. This paper investigates certain indirectness phenomena observed in sentence-final forms in Japanese from the perspective of the Natural Semantic Metalanguage (NSM) theory. It combines NSM theory with Kamio’s theory of territory of information. Akio Kamio used this theory to specify the relationship between utterance forms and the notion of territory of information. As he points out, there are cases where the principles of the theory can be violated; it seems that such violations are more or less culturally determined. This paper particularly focuses on such cases and provides a cross-cultural analysis of Japanese and English, making use of contrastive data from both languages.


Research carried out in consultation with or under the supervision of one or more experienced NSM practitioners

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