Hedging In Scholarly Journal Articles And Popular Magazine Articles On Business And Economics: A Comparative Study

This thesis investigates how hedging in scholarly journal articles (SJAs) differs from that in popular magazine articles (PMAs). SJAs are intended for expert-to-expert communications while PMAs are targeted at lay readers who possess a lower level of technicality compared to SJAs readers. Through my investigation, it has been found that hedging, a linguistic resource expressing uncertainty, tentativeness or probability, is a central feature of SJAs. However, hedging can also be found to exist to a great extent in PMAs, which are less specialized, and to achieve quite different communicative functions from the ones achieved in SJAs. On the basis of 40 authentic published articles on business and economics drawn from journals and magazines, the paper conducts a comparative study on the linguistic devices that realize hedging, relative frequency of hedges and the ranking order of the most frequent hedges both in SJAs and PMAs on business and economics. Interpretations on both semantic and pragmatic functions of hedging in economic discourse and writers' purpose of using hedging are expounded.The findings clearly indicate that the use of hedging in SJAs shares some similarities with that in PMAs, but the differences between them outweigh the similarities. One of the most important findings of this paper is that hedging is not only a central feature in SJAs but also typical of PMAs dealing with similar topics although hedging is found to occur far more frequently in SJAs than in PMAs. It is argued that there are significant differences between the communicative functions of hedging in the two genres investigated. The reason for the differences can be traced back to the writer-reader relationship in these two genres. Targeting audiences of different levels of background knowledge, writers adopt different hedging devices to adjust the information to the needs of the readers.These findings are considered to have some implications in language teaching, materials grading and further research on hedging phenomenon. The limitations as well as the recommendations are presented in the concluding remarks.