A Comparative Study Of Hedging In Abstracts Of English Ma Theses By American And Chinese Writers

An abstract is a miniature of a MA thesis, and it is a concise,comprehensive and systematic summary of the thesis. Thus, it plays anessential role in the academic thesis’ publication. Hedging, as a commonstrategy in English abstract writing, reflects the author’s scientific attitudeand due respect to his readers. Nowadays, with the constant update ofscientific research articles, English abstract has been more and moreimportant in academic exchanges. However, there are limited studiesrelated to hedges in abstract writing. Therefore, this study, based onHyland’s definition (1998) and Varttala’ classification (2001) on hedges,forms two corpora, namely English abstracts of MA theses written byAmerican and Chinese writers, and tries to make a qualitative andquantitative study on the hedges used in the two corpora. By analyses, thepresent study reaches some conclusions. In general, the two corpora sharethe following similarities:1. the two corpora show high frequency inusing hedges in abstract writing.2. They share a similar descendingfrequency order among the five categories as modal verbs, full verbs,adverbs, adjectives and nouns. Besides similarities, there are also somedifferences:1. American writers not only use twice as many hedges astheir Chinese counterparts (24.3per1000words vs.13.3per1000words),their hedging devices are also more varied.2. Chinese writers use muchless epistemic adjectives and nouns.3. Chinese writers tend to use more strong modal verbs. The present study explores reasons behind thedifferences in terms of cultural differences, language proficiency andwriting habits. In the end, the author proposes some pedagogicalsuggestions for teaching hedges. It is hoped that this study will improveEnglish learners’ proficiency in using hedges in future academic writing.