| Hedges and boosters are two main categories of interpersonal metadiscoursemarkers that are widely used in different genres of writing. News reports, as a means ofmass media, offer an important source of information for audience in daily life.However, few researches have been conducted to investigate the use of hedges andbooster in English economic news. In recent years, comparative analysis of hedges andboosters in specific genres has become a research hotspot. Although a growing numberof scholars have explored the cross-linguistic and cross-disciplinary differences in theuse of hedges and boosters, very few have attempted to analyze these two devices innative and non-native texts.The present study is based on two small parallel corpora with a total of42,318words. Each corpus consists of30articles carefully selected from the representativeEnglish-medium news websites, in this case, Beijing Review and the Economist. Onthe basis of previous researches, including Hyland’s list of hedges and boosters,Peacock’s list of boosters and Prince’s classification of hedges, the hedges and boosterthat occurred in the corpora are identified in the context, and then recorded andpresented respectively.Results indicate that the number of hedges far exceeds that of boosters in bothcorpora. Native writers for English economic news employ a lot more hedges than theirnon-native counterparts while little difference can be observed in the use of boosters.Overall, native news writers employ a larger number of hedges, a wider range of hedgesand a different type of hedges. Almost all types of hedges are more frequently used innative English economic news but there is one exception: attribution shields occupy amuch larger proportion in non-native English news. In addition, some hedging andboosting devices are underused or overused in English economic news written byChinese journalists. Lastly, possible reasons are proposed to explain the cross-culturaldifferences in the use of hedges and boosters. |
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