Claiming Knowledge Through Hedging

The present thesis attempts to conduct a descriptive analysis of hedging in English scientific discourse. In linguistics, the term "hedge/hedging" is introduced by George Lakoff (1972) to describe linguistic items "whose job it is to make things fuzzier or less fuzzy". Since he puts forward the almost classic definition of "hedge/hedging", the concept of "hedge/hedging" has been continually widened and developed. Much progress has been made in the past years in the areas of hedging study and its application to various fields. With the development of pragmatics, the study of hedge is extending to the functions hedges serve in different genres of discourse.It is generally believed that professional scientific writing is a series of impersonal statements of facts, which add up to the truth. However, it is just the nature of science and scientific discourse that gives hedges the indispensable role in academic communication. In the field of scientific discourse, it is important for authors to become familiar with relevant discourse conventions and learn to operate with them.This research first examines the occurrence of various kinds of hedges in English scientific discourse and classifying hedges based on the following taxonomy: epistemic modality like modal verbs, epistemic lexical verbs, epistemic adjectives, epistemic adverbs, and epistemic nouns. Additionally, other hedging devices, such as quantifying hedges and discourse-based hedges are also taken into account in the present research. No matter how hedges are classified, they ail serve to help writers to give a more accurate version of their knowledge claims and at the same time to hold back full commitment to the claims.Based on the analysis of the English scientific articles selected from the journals of Science and Nature, the present research offers statistical results concerning the relative frequencies and distributional patterns of hedging items in English scientific...