A Comparative Study On English Hedges In Chinese And Native English Academic Articles From The Perspective Of Metapragmatic Awareness

Hedges are one of the most typical indicators of pragmatic competence,which are frequently used in English academic articles by both Chinese academic writers and native English academic writers.As one of metapragmatic markers,hedges play a dual role in reflecting metapragmatic awareness and expressing interpersonal meaning.With Varttala's(2001)taxonomy of hedges as the analytical framework,two purpose-driven corpora will be established in this study to analyze the use of hedges as metapragmatic markers in English academic articles from the perspective of metapragmatic awareness.The source of the two self-complied corpora is two comparable journals in applied linguistics,namely Chinese Journal of Applied Lingustics(CJAL)and Applied Linguistics(AL).There are mainly three research questions in this study: What are the differences in hedges as metapragmatic markers in terms of the frequency,types and distribution between English academic articles by Chinese and native English writers? What are the differences in metapragmatic awareness reflected by the distinctive use of hedges as metapragmatic markers? What are the differences in interpersonal meaning between two types of English academicarticles caused by differenthedges andmetapragmatic awareness?To identify the hedges in the two corpora,the statistic tool named AntConc is applied to retrieve the frequency,types and distribution of different hedges.In accordance with the results of Ant Conc 3.5.0 retrieval and previous related studies,the method of case study is applied to answer the second and third research questions.Results indicate that overall native English academic writers employ more hedges than the Chinese counterparts and they show significant differences in most choices of subcategories of hedges and distribution.Meanwhile,native English academicwriters have a relatively stronger metapragmatic awareness compared with the Chinese counterparts.In light of different interpersonal meanings,native English academic writers enjoy a higher level of linguistic politeness,self-protection and negotiability.