A Cross-disciplinary Comparative Study Of Hedges In The Conclusion Part Of The Scientific Terminology Article

Hedges refer to the structures expressing uncertainty,with lexicons,phrases and sentences included.Through hedges,propositions are made to be more certain or less certain which at the same time can avoid arbitrariness,mitigate tones and save the writers from the commitment to the proposition.In this study,through the corpus-based approach,three corpora of conclusions are complied,namely linguistics corpus,economics corpus and physics corpus.Each corpus consists of 45 conclusions from 3 high-level international journals,with every article written by the native English speakers.Based on the definition and categorizations of hedges proposed by Hyland,through comparative research,this study finds that hedges are applied frequently in the conclusion part of all three fields.However,as for the use frequency,the choice of the categories and specific hedges,each field has its own preference.This study holds the view that these differences are contributed by the disciplinary discrepancy.The findings of this study,to some extent,have some implications on the EAP instruction and academic English writing.