Hedges in Advertisements Pertaining to Dietary Supplement for Weight Loss: Their Uses and Mechanism of Action

Abstract

            The purpose of this paper is to study and show a usage of hedges in advertisements pertaining to dietary supplement for weight loss: their uses and mechanism of action. It is conducted using 111 brochures. The size of the corpus was 64,966 words. In this study, lexical and phrasal hedges in this kind of genre were analyzed based on a functional definition proposed by Hyland (1998) and the ellipsis technique suggested by Crompton (1997).

            According to the results, based on the grammatical criteria proposed by Thai Language Institute (2009), lexical hedges found in this study were in the forms of initial verbs, complement verbs, intransitive verbs, auxiliary verbs, and quantity words; Phrasal hedges were verb phrases and prepositional phrases. These hedges were used to reduce the degree of certainty, confidence or commitment in some particular contexts in Thai dietary supplement for weight loss advertisement brochures such as claiming their product’s quality.