Analysis Of Hedges In English Academic Writings-An Adaptation Approach

Despite a widely held view that academic writing is purely objective and impersonal, the means by which scholars convey an attitude to their statements is central to academic argument. The need to present claims with precision and caution means that hedges are a significant resource for academics in anticipating the reader's possible rejection of their propositions (Hyland, 1995). Hedging is a basic feature in academic discourse (Rounds, 1982). Since Lakoff (1972) first used the term to describe"words whose job it is to make things more or less fuzzy", the study of hedging has been a subject of increasing interest to linguists. However, this concept, has received most attention in its role in casual conversation. The study of hedges in genre-based texts began in the 1980s. Despite this interest, however, there has been little work into how hedges work in academic genres based on a linguistics theory. This thesis is intended to make an analysis of hedges in English academic writings by adopting the adaptation theory proposed by Jef Verschueren. According to the adaptation theory, using language is a continuous choice-making process. This theory provides a new prospective for the study of hedges, thus giving an adaptation interpretation of hedges in academic texts. In academic writings, the use of hedges by the writer is a matter of linguistic choices in various levels of language use. For example, the writer needs to choose linguistic strategies, one of which is hedging; he/she also needs to choose specific hedging terms according to different purposes; the choices are not only made by the writer, but also by the reader in his/her interpretation of a hedging expression. Linguistic choices made by the language users are to adapt to the context. According to Verschueren, context includes language users, the mental world, the social world and the physical world. Therefore, the choice of hedges in academic writings by the language users are the result of adaptation to the context, namely: adaptation to the mental world, including both the writer's and the reader's mental world; adaptation to the social world, including both the social conventions and the social positions of the language users; adaptation to the physical world, both in content and in form.