| The present cross-cultural and cross-disciplinary study was aimed at exploring the similarities and differences between English and Indonesian research articles from the disciplines of applied linguistics and chemistry in terms of frequency of usage of hedges (e.g. perhaps, may) and boosters (e.g. clearly, very). Theoretically, the study was designed to examine whether sociocultural context in which the articles were produced and discipline solely affect the rate of use of hedges and boosters in research articles. To this end, a corpus of 104 research articles (i.e. articles reporting on empirical research) from the two languages and disciplines were analyzed quantitatively with the help of corpus linguistic method. The findings of the study revealed that overall English research articles were more tentative than Indonesian articles, indicated by the more frequent use of hedges found in the former set of articles and the more frequent use of boosters found in the latter set of articles. The within-language comparison conducted showed that scholars from the two disciplines did not use hedges and boosters at comparable rates. This suggested that sociocultural context in which the research articles were produced did not largely influence the frequency of use of hedges and boosters. Likewise, the within-discipline comparison also showed that scholars writing in the two languages did not use hedges and boosters comparably frequently, which suggested that discipline also did not largely affect the frequency of use of the two rhetorical features. It is proposed that frequency of use of hedges and boosters in research articles might be influenced by the cultural models adopted by the individual scholars, and that hedges and boosters had differing situated meanings for different groups of scholars, and that the two rhetorical features were used by the scholars to construct a particular identity. |
