Analysis On One Hedging Strategy—Epistemic Lexical Verbs In Academic & Research Articles

This thesis is a report of a computer-aided investigation into one hedging strategy -Epistemic Lexical Verbs (ELY) in Academic and Research Articles (ARA). A comprehensive understanding of hedging in academic writing involves an attempt to provide a description of the development of the rhetoric of academic and research writing and an attempt to interpret it from theoretical perspectives of politeness,speech act and epistemic modality. With an overview of the literature,especially of the latest researches on ELVs,hedging is further exemplified in terms of discoursal function.The study is based on the statistical analysis of the frequencies and distributions of 42 ELVs in CARA,in contrast to the other two corpora- BROWNA and LOBA. SNOBOL4 programs have been applied to process the data provided in the three corpora. The features of ELVs in CARA are obtained and illustrated based on the results of Chi-square tests and examples cited from the running texts of the three corpora. It is concluded that,though it is widely held that academic writing is objective,compact and informational,ELVs prevail considerably in ARAs,especially in the rhetorical sections of Discussion and Results. The Chi-square tests show that the proportion of the frequencies of these ELVs in CARA is much higher than that in BROWNA and LOBA,and the distributions of the verbs are significantly different form those in the other two corpora.The thesis is written to help NNS students to understand they should master a number of ELVs systematically,instead of overusing some modal verbs in their writing. Therefore,the significance of the study lies in the fact that,in the process of advanced writing teaching,proper command and appropriate application may contribute to the improvement of persuasiveness and reliability of NNS students' articles and that priority should be focused on the most frequently used ELVs forms.