| Language is fuzzy. Many references of the words do not have concise denotation in the real world, and there is no clear-cut boundary between them. For example, how high should a mountain be and how low could it be called a hill? Another category of language fuzziness expression is hedges like sort of, almost, about, seem etc., which can revise, restrict concepts or propositions to make language flexible and leave room for negotiation. The former is fuzzy concept, and the latter is referred to as hedges, which is evaluated as the most common, typical and worthy researching fuzzy language.Hedges were proposed by George Lakoff in 1972 to describe lexical units as expression "whose job is to make things more or less fuzzy." After the inauguration by Lakoff, western scholars did research on hedges from different perspectives in 1980s, and research papers are published by their Chinese counterparts as well such as He Ziran , Chen Zhi'an etc.This paper mainly adopts Hyland's point of view on hedges and makes a little revision about his category. Hyland classify hedges into two groups in the perspective of function: content-oriented hedges, reader-oriented hedges. After a thorough study on hedges , the author categorized hedges into three types, which are content-oriented hedges, writer-oriented hedges and reader-oriented hedges on the basis the prof. Gao Xiaofang' research on hedges in Central China Normal University. Content-oriented hedges mitigate the relationship between propositional content and representation of reality. They hedge the correspondence between what the writer says about the world and what the world is thought to be like. These involve the writer's desire to express propositions with greater precision. Content-oriented hedges are mainly realized by modal verbs, epistemic adverbs, epistemic adjectives, epistemic nouns etc. Writer-oriented hedges are writer-focused and aim to shield the writer from the consequences of opposition by limiting personal commitment. These hedges thus diminish the author's presence in the text. The author's responsibility can be reduced by the use of passive construction, impersonal structure, strategic hedges which reference to limiting experimental conditions, reference to a model, theory, or methodology, and admission to a lack of knowledge. Reader-oriented hedges concern more with interaction between writer and the readers, in which authors may invite the reader to become involved in the discourse and participate in negotiating the status of the information presented. According to Hyland, reader-oriented hedges often involve the presence of the author displaying his or her as one who holds a view that has been formed individually. So reader- oriented hedges are realized by personal attribution and questions. As for scientific articles, there is a popular belief that it is a purely objective, impersonal and informational style, designed to disguise the author and deal directly with facts. But while our English courses often provide the linguistic means to accomplish this invisibility, they often ignore the fact that effective academic writing always carries the individual's point of view. Writers also need to present their claims cautiously, accurately and modestly to meet discourse community expectations and to gain acceptance for their statements. Such pragmatic aspects of communication however are vulnerable to cross-cultural differences and L2 students are rarely able to hedge their statements appropriately.This paper created two self-complied English scientific research articles (SRA)corpora, a Chinese English Learner(CEL)corpus and a Native English Speaker (NES)corpus authored by Chinese and native English writers respectively, all together 40 articles extracting from biological engineering , chemical engineering, astronomy and physics, environmental sciences with the total number of 124,909 running words and made a quantitative and qualitative contrast of them under the guidance of Hyland' view about hedging, aiming to find out the similarities and differences of hedging usage in SRA authored by Chinese and native English researchers. Through the study of hedges in incidence, functions and realizations etc, we found that hedges used in CEL corpus are fewer than those in NES corpus both in number and variety and Chinese writer tend to use more forceful hedges. According to the difference and their possible reasons, the author confirmed that hedging devices are a major pragmatic feature of effective scientific writing and proposed some suggestions and implications as concerns the pedagogy of English for Specific Purposes (ESP) with the purpose of improving L2 writer's awareness of hedging and competence of using hedging appropriately in their academic writing, and wish this study can shed light on China's translation.This paper includes six chapters. Chapter One is the introduction section. Chapter Two is literature review, offering some previous studies and background knowledge about hedging in English scientific research articles (SRA). The data collection and research method are described in detail in Chapter Three. Chapter Four tries to figure out the various realizations devices of hedges and made a contrast in English scientific research articles (SRA) authored by Chinese and English researchers. Chapter Five is the findings of the research and implications for teaching, writing and translation. The last chapter comes with the conclusions and limitations of this study.
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