Hedging In The Conclusion Part Of English Scientific Research Articles: A Contrastive Study Of Native English Researchers And Chinese Researchers

English has become the predominant language of academic fields,thus the ability to write academic articles in English appropriately and flexibly is crucial for those scholars and researchers who desire to succeed in academic fields.The present study is undertaken to analyze the hedging devices in the conclusions of English scientific research articles. Hedging is an important strategy which is frequently used in English scientific research articles,for it can mark the writer's attitude to both propositions and the audience,leave room for discussion and show the writer's scientific honesty and deference to their peers. On the other hand,the conclusion of a scientific research article is an important element that attracts the reader to read your article,for conclusion summarizes the major findings of the whole study as well as suggests some prospects of the future work sometimes.There is,therefore,a need for a comprehensive description of hedging in conclusions of scientific research articles.Based on the criteria of representative and accessibility of selecting research sources (Nwogu,1997),two corpora of conclusions in scientific research articles are compiled,NR (native English researchers)corpus and CR(Chinese researchers)corpus,both of which are composed of 45 conclusions.Both corpora cover three academic disciplines,physics, biology and chemistry,and in each field of each corpus 15 conclusions are selected.Based on the definition and categorizations of hedging in scientific research articles proposed by Hyland(1998),the hedging devices in both corpora are marked out manually since the identification of hedging is heavily relied on contextual knowledge and there is no such kind of procedure that can identify all hedging devices.Meanwhile,computer scanning is employed to spot certain words in both corpora and it is aided with handpicking job to assure of the accuracy.After the identification,a detailed list of these hedging devices in both corpora is compiled respectively.By presenting a detailed description concerning the frequency of hedging use in both corpora,the present study conducts a contrastive analysis of hedging use by native English researchers and Chinese researchers in order to find out the similarities and differences between them and to explore the possible reasons for the differences,if there are any.In the present study,both corpora are frequently hedged by various hedging devices, but on the whole the frequency of hedging use in CR corpus is lower than that in NR corpus,and hedging use in CR corpus is not as diverse as that in NR corpus.These differences are discussed from the perspectives of cultural differences,language proficiency,the writers' ignorance of the conventions and rules observed by the academic community.The present study have some implications for improving Chinese writers' awareness of hedging use and some suggestions are tentatively given to the English teachers in China to be aware of the importance of hedging use in their teaching,which in turn may help the students to express themselves more flexibly and appropriately in conclusion writing.