Hedging In Social Scientific Research Articles

The concept of hedging finds its way from logic and semantics into the study of discourse in the 1960s and has since been developed further in pragmatics and discourse analysis. As a linguistic concept, hedging has received much attention in literature. Research on hedging phenomenon has been conducted within areas such as logic, semantics, linguistics, pragmatics and discourse analysis, etc. In each of these areas, the concept of hedging is referred to in a different way. In pragmatics and discourse analysis, hedging is generally regarded as a textual strategy of using linguistic devices as hedges in a certain context for particular communicative purposes such as politeness, mitigation, vagueness, etc.The role of hedging in oral discourse was much discussed in the 1980s. However, only in the late 1980s or early 1990s did attention begin to shift onto hedging in academic discourse. This may be because academic discourse is often believed to be highly objective and impersonal characterized by linguistic features such as passive voice and impersonalized expressions. In fact, academic writing, like any other type of discourse is interactive involving the writers trying to persuade readers of the validity of their statements. Hedging, therefore, is a crucial means to enable writers to present their statements with caution and to enter into a dialogue with their readers. The role of hedging in academic discourse, especially in natural science, has been well studied in literature. However, little attention has been paid to hedging in social science, so the present study attempts to investigate hedging in social scientific research articles through a combination of quantitative and qualitative approaches. The corpus used consists of 20 research articles taken from international journals in applied linguistics, which are Applied Linguistics, Discourse Studies, Language Learning and Journal of Pragmatics. Based on the previous hedging models, this study proposes a dual-function model of hedging. On the basis of this model, a taxonomy of hedges is put forwards, which includes epistemic lexical verbs, epistemic modal verbs, epistemic adjectives, adverbs and nouns, discourse-based hedges and other forms of hedges.The quantitative analysis has demonstrated the numerical significance of hedges in social scientific research articles. The frequencies of hedges show that epistemic lexical verbs are the most common means of expressing mitigation in research articles. The distributional information of hedges among four sections of a research article reveals that the Discussion section has the highest frequency of hedges, while the Method section the least. Such a difference is related to different rhetorical functions of these two sections. A comparison of hedges between social science and natural science demonstrates that epistemic lexical verbs and epistemic modal verbs concerning the tentativeness of propositions are more frequently employed in social science than in natural science; while epistemic adjectives and adverbs concerning the accuracy of propositions are used less frequently in social science than in natural science.The qualitative analysis which is based on the dual-function model has illustrated the important role of various hedges in realizing the epistemic function and interpersonal function in social scientific discourse.It is hoped that through such analyses, the present thesis would help to raise Chinese students' awareness of hedging and help to develop their ability in applying hedges in academic writing.