| It is often believed that academic writing, particularly scientific writing, is factual. However an important feature of academic writing is the concept of cautious language, this technique is called hedging or hedges. However, no widely accepted translation of this word can be found in Chinese academic circles. In present study, the author adopted the translation of this word in English-Chinese Linguistic words to express this linguistic phenomenon. By using hedging, the writer can make decisions about his stance on a particular subject, or the strength of the claims he is making, the absoluteness of the statements will be decreased, more room for discussion can be achieved, therefore, academic writers need to present their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly to show the writer's scientific honesty and deference to their peers, to meet the expectations of corresponding discourse community, to gain acceptance for their statements, and to enter a dialogue with their audience accordingly, it can be said that hedging can serve as the interactive elements which bridge between text information and author's interpretation.The abstract, as the miniature of the academic article, can serve as a time-saving device for readers to quickly grasp the main points of the whole paper. In the informational age with increasing scientific production, English abstracts have become the important means to convey information in international academic exchange and provide the convenience for the inclusion of scientific informative retrieval systems (for instance, SCI, EI, ISTP, etc.), therefore, the quality of English abstracts directly relates to the spread and exchange of scientific research achievements in the world. In order to investigate Chinese EFL(English as foreign language) researchers'use of hedging in English abstracts of SLA articles in comparison with those of ENS(English Native Speaker) researchers, this paper presents a comparative analysis of hedges in two self-compiled English abstract corpora, namely, Chinese native speakers corpus (CNS Corpus) and English native speakers corpus (ENS Corpus), Varttala's taxonomy of lexical hedges are adopted and SPSS 17.0 are applied to quantitatively compare the use of hedging in two corpora.It is found that some similarities exist in two corpora, both CNS researchers and ENS researchers employ many hedges in English abstracts, and nouns and adjectives are the most frequently used hedges. Comparatively, adverbs are among the least frequent means to function as hedges. However, some obvious differences in the amount and frequency of hedges can be found between the two corpora, Chinese researchers use fewer hedges and fewer types of hedges than ENS researchers. The possible factors may be attributed to the lack of awareness and guidance of using hedges; native language transfer; the complexity of hedging, the order of acquisition and the degree of difficulty of English words. This paper also provides some suggestions and implications for teaching English writing in an attempt to encourage Chinese EFL learners to be aware of hedging and use them appropriately in their articles.The thesis consists of six parts: the first part is the introduction; the second part offers the literature review which discusses the previous studies and some general knowledge about hedging; the third part gives a detailed description of the research design of the present study; the fourth part is the main part of the whole paper, presenting a comparative analysis between two corpora; the fifth part describes the results of the comparative study and the pedagogy implication. The last part serves as the conclusion, in which the author summarizes the main findings, addresses the possible limitations as well as suggestions for future research. |
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