A Contrastive Study Of Hedging In Research Articles On Physics And Linguistics

Hedging is one of the strategies frequently employed in academic writing. This strategy is mainly used to comment on previous studies involved and indicate the author's attitude and commitment to the propositions or claims s/he has presented. Meanwhile, appropriate use of hedging may not merely reflect the author's scientific attitude, his or her merits of modesty and caution as well as deference to their peers, but also leave room for further discussion. At present, although many a researcher has begun to probe into the hedging phenomena in research articles (RAs), they focus their attention largely on medicine, biology and economics. In the present study, two academic corpora are compiled: one consists of 30 linguistics RAs, and the other 30 physics RAs. By presenting a contrastive study of the two academic corpora, and providing both qualitative and quantitative analysis of the incidence, categories, distribution as well as various functions of hedging devices in both corpora, the study reveals, in terms of hedging, that there exist not only similarities but also disciplinary discrepancies between linguistics RAs and physics RAs. These findings will expectedly be of great help to the teaching of English for Academic Purpose (EAP).The thesis is made up of six chapters. Chapter One briefly introduces the rationale as well as the aims of the present study, and puts forth the questions to be addressed. Chapter Two reviews some previous studies on hedging, which are closely related to the present study, and points out the analytical model to be adopted. Chapter Three gives a specific account of the methodology to be used in collecting data and methods used in analyzing the data. Chapter Four investigates the incidence, categories, distribution of hedging devices as well as their semantic functions in both linguistics and physics RAs. Chapter Five discusses the findings from Chapter Four and the pragmatic application of hedging devices in the two disciplines. Chapter Six discusses the application of the results in the teaching of EAP, and points out some limitations possibly found in the present study.