Chapter One Introduction
1.1 Research Background
Using hedge as a linguistic term can be traced back to Lakoff’s (1973) work where hedge refers to “words whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy”. Since the introduction of hedge, it has been widely studied in discourse analysis and pragmatics. Scholars in this field have developed many principles to define hedges and have proposed many taxonomies to conduct their studies.
Hedges have been employed in various discourse such as daily conversation, medical discourse and legal language, and they have been considered as one of the most important strategies of mitigating knowledge claims in that they allow the writer to convey tentativeness and possibility. Hedges also play a significant role in academic discourse including deductions, assumptions and propositions because they could allow writers to be less committed to the propositions they make and to illustrate propositions as opinions rather than facts (Hyland, 1996).
In recent years, many approaches to the research of hedges have emerged, namely cross-cultural study, cross-disciplinary study and even cross-gender study. Researchers that conduct cross-cultural studies find that there are significant differences concerning the use of hedges between different language groups. Hu Guangwei and Cao Feng (2011) find that English-medium journals use much more hedges than Chinese-medium journals and abstracts of empirical research articles use more boosters than non-empirical academic articles in abstract section. Jolanta Szymanska’s (2013) study on gendered use of hedges in academic discourse shows that female writers use twice as many hedges expressing doubt as male writers and the males express certainty twice as often as female writers.
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1.2 Research Purpose and Significance
The conclusion section, is the destination, overall judgment and evaluation of findings and results, being regarded as a finishing touch for the whole text. Appropriate uses of them can make authors better adjust their relationships with their own propositions and arguments, and help to establish a kind of power relations between themselves and the readers as well as reviewers (Mu et al. 2015). Therefore, if the authors are capable of hedging, expressing their propositions and statement tentatively or in a more cautious or less assertive manner, it is more likely that their evaluations would be accepted by a certain academic discourse community.
Unlike spoken discourse in which frequent use of hedges could be considered as features of powerless language (Holtgraves and Lasky, 1999), using hedges in academic writing is regarded as a much more cautious approach to materials and research results being presented, which could help academics gain recognition and acceptance for their studies (Hyland, 2000:179). So being capable of using hedges seems to be of great significance for academics and English learners.
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Chapter Two Literature Review
2.1 Previous Studies on Hedges in Academic Writing
Hedge as a linguistic concept is introduced by G. Lakoff. Lakoff (1973)defines “hedge” as a word “whose job is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy” , namely words like “sort of” or “strictly speaking” for approximating or reinforcing expressions. From a purely semantic perspective, Lakoff is mainly concerned with the logical properties of hedges such as “rather” or “sort of” and how they affect the truth value of the proposition of the expressions they modify.
The definition of hedges and their pragmatic significance are developed by Lakoff’s followers. Zadeh (1965) claims that words such as “approximately”, “much”, “more or less” and “very” can be hedges to extend the range of the definition of hedging. In this sense, hedging has the function in confining the fuzzy degree of a statement. Apart from this, hedges can be expressions of fuzziness when used with a word that has an accurate meaning. That is to say, it has the function of making expressions with accurate meanings turn to be fuzzier.
Brown and Levinson (1987) states that a hedge is “a particle, word or phrase that modifies the degree of membership of a predicate or a noun phrase in a set”, which specifies Lakoff’s definition. They put emphasis on the illocutionary function of hedges rather than on the propositional meaning or certain performative verbs as their two predecessors did. They studies the illocutionary function of hedges from politeness perspective as well as their significance through Grice’s maxims, which include maxims of quantity, quality, relevance, and manner.
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2.2 Previous Studies of Hedges in Different Sections of Academic Writing
So far, many studies have been conducted on hedge use in different sections in academic writing. Some scholars like Salager-Meryer (1994), Hyland (1996), Varttala (2001),Yang An, Zheng Shuyuan and Ge Guangchun (2015), Xu Jiang, Zheng Li and Zhang Haiming(2014), mainly focus on introduction, method, result, and discussion, aiming to investigate the differences in different sections on hedge use.
Salager-Meyer (1994) compares the hedges between research articles and case reports in medical English discourse and finds that hedges with relatively high frequency in both genres are compound hedges, approximators and shields, and that discussion/comment sections are the most heavily hedged, followed by results, introduction and method sections in decreasing order of frequency.
Hyland (1996) identifies the major forms of hedges, namely content-oriented hedges, writer-oriented hedges, and reader-oriented hedges, functions and distribution of hedges in a corpus of 26 molecular biology research articles and describes the importance of hedging in this genre.
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Chapter Three Theoretical Framework ................. 18
3.1 Crompton’s Taxonomy .................... 18
3.2 Functions of Hedges .................... 20
Chapter Four Analysis of Hedges in the Corpora .................. 22
4.1 Distribution of Hedges in AT Corpus and CT Corpus ............ 22
4.2 Realization of Hedges in the Corpora ............... 24
Chapter Five Conclusion ....................... 46
5.1 Major Findings .................. 46
5.2 Pedagogical Implications ...................... 48
5.3 Limitations and Recommendations for Future Study ........... 49
Chapter Four Analysis of Hedges in the Corpora
4.1 Distribution of Hedges in AT Corpus and CT Corpus
As illustrated in Table 4-1, results of overall frequency of hedges are displayed. In CT Corpus, there are 31780 tokens, original frequency and standard frequency is respectively 336 and 1057. That is to say, among 31780 running words, 336 hedges are used and appear 1057 times per 100,000 words. In AT corpus, there are 27735 tokens, original frequency is 407, and standard frequency is1476. That is, among the 27735 running words in AT Corpus, 407 hedges are used, and appear 1476 times per 100,000 words.
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Chapter Five Conclusion
5.1 Major Findings
Taking Crompton’s (1997) taxonomy and definition as the working theoretical framework, the study aims to analyze statistic and linguistic characteristics, investigate similarities and differences on hedge use by Chinese authors and American authors, and provide possible interpretation for the differences.
In terms of the statistic characteristics on the hedge use in Chinese MA theses corpus and American MA theses corpus, results show that there exist significant differences between Chinese authors and American authors (p=0.000 ＜ 0.05). American authors use more hedges than their Chinese counterparts, which is in line with Xu Jiang, Zheng Li and Zhang Haiming’s (2014) and Chen Chenghui and Lawrance Jun Zhang’s (2016) findings that native authors use more hedges than their ESL/EFL counterparts.
As for linguistic characteristics, the present study investigates frequency and functions of six categories of hedges. In terms of frequency of epistemic copulas, the finding shows that American authors use more than their counterparts, which is different from that of Chen Chenghui and Lawrance Jun Zhang’s (2016) that no difference is found between the two. Specifically, seem and appear are more frequently employed by American authors, which may due to a better grasp of language. Also Chinese authors use tend, a high degree of orientation, as frequently as American authors do. Chen Chenghui and Lawrance Jun Zhang’s (2016) believe the frequent use of tend can be attributed to Chinese authors’ insufficiency of L2 sociopragmatic competence which results in the negative transfer of L1 culturally-based rhetorical norms.
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