A Comparative Study On The Use Of Hedges In English Papers Written By Chinese And Native Authors

As English has become the lingua franca in international academia,scholars need to write effectively in English.English academic paper is of objectivity,precision,accuracy,while hedges,as the role of moderating,are always neglected in academic papers.However,hedging is actually an important writing strategy in academic papers and it can make writers’ claims less absolute.But Chinese ESL(English as a second language)learners have problems when they use English hedges to write academic papers,which demands further study.This paper adopts Hyland’s definition and Varttala’s classification of hedges.And AntConc 3.4.4 and SPSS 19.0 are applied to analyze the marine-science papers that are selected as samples in CEAPC(Chinese English Academic Papers Corpus)and NEAPC(Native English Academic Papers Corpus)corpora.And the comparative study reveals the features and function of hedges in academic papers written by English native writer and Chinese ESL learners.It is found that there is a similarity between English native writers and Chinese ESL learners on the use of hedges.They all prefer to use modal auxiliary,epistemic adjective adverb,but epistemic nouns and epistemic verbs are not used frequently.However,there are still differences between Chinese ESL learners and English native authors on the use of hedges.For example,although the frequencies of hedges used by Chinese ESL learners are higher than that of English native scholars,the types of hedges used by Chinese scholars are not rich and they tend to make inappropriate stronger writer commitments.This paper makes a further analysis on the reasons that lead to these similarities and differences and puts forward reasonable suggestions.It hopes that this study can help Chinese scholars to use hedges better in English academic papers.