| Hedges are communicative strategies which explicitly qualify categorical assertions or statements,representing a weakening claim about a given state of affairs.The employment of hedging devices such as possible,may and seem,enables writers to express tentativeness or uncertainty toward the referential information presented,mitigate their commitment to the accuracy or precision of the proposition expressed and distance themselves from what is being said(Hyland,1998b).Hedges are important rhetorical devices in academic writing,just as Skelton(1988)says,the use of hedging devices in scientific discourse is a necessary and vitally important skill.Its importance lies in the fact that hedging devices allow academic writers to convey their attitude to the truth of what is stated,to anticipate potential opposition to a proposition and to start a dialogue with their readers(Hyland,1996a).Considering that using hedges is a basic feature in scientific discourse,a growing number of researchers have carried out cross-cultural,cross-linguistic and crossdisciplinary studies on hedges in academic writing such as the research articles here.However,there have not been many studies analyzing hedges in scientific language use in the two fields of linguistics and biology,which can be viewed as representatives of the “soft” and “hard” sciences respectively,and not many studies have been made to explore the use of hedges in the Discussion sections of research articles in the two topic areas.Therefore,the present study aims to explore the use of hedges in the Discussions of English research articles of two disciplines of linguistics and biology.Based on Hyland's(1996a)taxonomy of hedges,this thesis conducts a comparative study on the use of hedges in two self-complied sub-corpora of English research articles,which are the corpus of the Discussion sections of linguistics research articles and the corpus of the Discussion sections of biology research articles.Each subcorpus consists of 25 English research articles drawn from Internet editions of scholarly journals,with a total of 62,494 running words.Lexical hedges are classified into five categories according to the classification model proposed by Hyland,and 153 frequently used lexical items in hedging use are chosen in the study.Those commonly occurring items then are retrieved in the two sub-corpora by utilizing the text analysis software AntConc 3.2.1 and their frequencies are recorded.Meanwhile,a Chi-square test was run to find any significant difference between the two disciplines as regards the employment of different types of hedges.Through the analysis of the two sub-corpora,it was found that hedges were quite common in the Discussion sections of English research articles on linguistics and biology,and the higher overall incidence of hedges was seen in the field of linguistics.Furthermore,all the five types of hedges studied were found in the linguistics and biology RAs,and hedges in the forms of modal verbs,lexical verbs and nouns were somewhat more frequent in the linguistic texts,while the other two categories of adverbs and adjectives occurred more often in the biological texts.In addition,findings of the present study revealed that there were some similarities between the two subject fields of linguistics and biology in the use of hedges,but considerable differences in terms of the overall frequency,distribution and preference of hedging devices could also be detected in the RA data.Lastly,the differences found are interpreted with respect to the general nature of the two disciplines,the objects of study,the kind of materials and methods used in the study.It is hoped that this study will make academic writers more aware of the importance of hedges in scientific discourse,help them better understand the hedging usage in English research articles,and improve their ability to appropriately use hedging devices in writing research articles. |
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