ATENUACIÓN Y DISCURSO ACADÉMICO: LAS "CONCLUSIONES" DE LA TESIS DE DOCTORADO.

This paper is a contribution to the study of hedging in Spanish academic discourse. The concept of hedging and the analysis methodology proposed and developed by the group Es.Var.Atenuación are taken as a starting point, and adapted to the characteristics of academic discourse. The study is based on a corpus of the "Conclusion" chapter of 50 PhD thesis written in recent years in Spain, in which hedging is used through a large number of procedures, through wich authors hide and mitigate their assertions, as requiered by the rethoric and conventions of academic writing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]