| It is generally accepted that academic writing is impersonal and objective, yet effectivewriting could not without employing hedges. As a writing strategy, it can mitigate thespeaking tone and reflect the writer’s prudent attitude in study and modest style in writing,and in the meanwhile it also can indicate the author’s attitude to avoid speaking categoricallyso as to leaving room for readers to discuss further.Being the essence of an academic article, the abstract is able to generate the paper’smain idea accurately and can help the readers to find what they want quickly without mistakes.It is an important carrier for scientific achievements to communicate and spread, playing akey role in delivering academic information which are significant. Based on two self-builtcorpora, Shanxi Normal University corpus (SNU) and the corpus of articles published ininternationally English journals (IEJ), the current paper tries to have a general understandingof the lexical hedging using situation in linguistics in Shanxi Normal University. By exploringthe lexical hedges in linguistics in Shanxi Normal University written by postgraduatesgraduated in2012and2013with a total number of130, some own preferences in choosingwords in each subcategory of the five types of hedges are listed. And Hyland’s (1998b)definition and Varttala’s (2001) version of classification are served as theoretical frameworkfor the current study. Besides, some own special features of lexical hedges used by students inlinguistics in Shanxi Normal University are summarized in the hope of offering some help infurther deep study of hedges and the study of hedges in English abstracts used by students inliberal arts and science majors in Shanxi Normal University.By application of Antconc3.2.2and SPSS17.0, the frequency of lexical hedges used inSUN corpus is calculated and its distribution and hedging using situation are also analyzed byexamples on the basis of self-built corpus. The final conclusions are listed as follows (1) The overall frequency and distribution oflexical hedges in linguistics abstracts in Shanxi Normal University are markedly differentfrom those in internationally published English journals;(2) As for the overall distribution,epistemic adverbs account for about40%of all hedges in SUN corpus while epistemic nounsonly occupy a small proportion with less than4%, which indicates that L1transfer may havesome influence on it. That is to say, epistemic adverbs are also frequently employed bystudents in Chinese writing and they are accustomed to translate the original Chinese versionof abstract into English directly. As a result, this translated version is more Chinese in nature.Besides, the rich varieties of vocabulary in English in expressing the same meaning inChinese could be an explanation to the small share of epistemic nouns, however, students inSUN corpus have difficulties in mastering them freely;(3) The overall frequency of lexicalhedges in linguistics English abstracts in SUN corpus is lower than in IEJ corpus but withmore different hedging items. It may due to the large word token compared with that in IEJcorpus. However, in the meanwhile, it also reflects that students’ conscious in using hedges isgrowing gradually. They have already known to employ different hedging items in abstractwriting intentionally;(4) The results show that statistical differences are found in the use ofepistemic modal auxiliaries, full verbs and epistemic adverbs but the use of epistemic nounsand epistemic adjectives are not that markedly different, which tells us more attention shouldbe paid to these three categories of hedges so that we could reach the goal of effectiveacademic writing;(5) Students in SUN corpus show their own special features in using eachsubcategory of the five types of hedges and have their own preferences in choosing each word.For this, some feasible suggestions on the further investigation are put forward by the authorwith an expectation to standardize students’ academic writing and eventually raise theirawareness in employing hedges. |
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