The Epistemic Status of Predictions in Central Bank Reports: A Cross-Linguistic Study

Abstract

This study aims to analyze the strategies of hedging in a prototypical speech act in economic communication—that is, predictions. The analyzed genre is that of central bank projections. We have used a parallel corpus of four reports (one European Central Bank report and three national bank reports) written in English, French, Spanish, and Portuguese. The analyzed documents are multimodal (having text, tables, and charts). At a global level, hedging arises from external assumptions that limit the validity of the predictions and from the fact that generally the text does not give direct predictions but rather reports projections without assuming or attributing explicit responsibility regarding their validity. At the microlinguistic level, the epistemic marking of predications about the future is extremely complex, due to the phenomenon of grammatical metaphor. The cross-language analysis shows that because of language idiosyncrasies, the degree of endorsement of the typical utterances about prediction/projection varies between the reports.