Hedging In English Economic Articles

The present study is conducted firstly to establish an up-to-date and a relatively more comprehensive understanding of hedging. Various aspects have been dealt with over the past 20 years. However, the concept of hedging is still an area of some dispute and scholars are showing a continuing interest in the topic.Despite a widely held belief that professional economic writing is a series of impersonal statements of facts, which add up to the truth, hedges are abundant in economic texts and play a critical role in academic writing. Hedges are important because even the most assured economic propositions have an inherently limited period of acceptance. Categorical assertions of truth in this circumstance are decidedly hazardous. Hedging enables writers to express a perspective on their statements, to present unproven claims with caution and to enter into a dialogue with their audiences.This study presents a comprehensive review of hedging and identifies the forms, frequencies and functions of hedging in economic articles. For this purpose, 12 English economic articles are chosen from The Economist, (June 8th, 2002) in which hedging phenomena are identified. A quantitative analysis of corpus reveals that a variety of hedging devices, especially lexical hedges, occur in English economic articles, which demonstrates the importance of hedging in English economic writing. By analyzing economic articles, statistic results concerning the relative frequencies and distributional information of hedging items are given. The results are useful in that they show how and why hedged expressions are used in economic writing. A comparative analysis is also conducted in this study about the difference between native English speakers and Chinese writers in using hedging in economic articles, hoping it'll be of some help to non-native English speakers in their economicwriting, especially to ESP teaching in China.