A Corpus-based Analysis Of Hedging In English Abstracts Of Academic Papers

Studies on hedges begin in the early 1970s. It is first studied from the logic and semantic perspectives to explain words that can make things fuzzy. With the development of pragmatics, the concept of hedges develops far from its origins. Nowadays, hedges are viewed as devices to realize hedging strategy for the purpose of politeness, mitigation, vagueness, and modality. In written text, it is argued that any linguistic form can be identified as a hedging strategy as long as it indicates tentativeness and possibility. Previous studies pay a great deal of attention on hedging in written text, both theoretically and empirically. However, the realization and functions of hedging in such specific domains as abstracts remain rarely discussed and worthy of exploration. An abstract is an essential part of an academic paper. It is important and inseparable because it works to generate main idea of the thesis and highlight the major issues in the text. With English turning out to be a worldwide language that can reach every corner of international academic community, effective English abstracts can attract more readers, helping writers to make their propositions accepted as knowledge and gain reputations in academic community. Therefore, this study is an analysis of hedging in English abstracts of scientific papers in terms of its realization and pragmatic functions. Giving a comprehensive description to explain the relationship between hedging and academic abstracts, the study intends to shed light on pedagogical teaching, to help researchers who want to write an acceptable English abstract for the quest of academic achievements in scientific world. To achieve these objectives, the following questions need to be answered:Question 1: Are there hedges in abstracts?Question 2: How are hedges applied and realized in English abstracts?Question 3: What are the pragmatic functions of hedges in English abstracts? This thesis is based on an English abstract corpus of social scientific papers. It uses quantitative and qualitative analyses to describe the realization of hedging in academic abstracts and discuss its pragmatic functions in such kind of written text. The present corpus consists of 61 English abstracts from 3 well-known social scientific journals to make sure that the selection is representative, famous and accessible. Adopting the definition and classification of hedging by Hyland (1998) in investigating hedging in scientific research articles, the thesis finds out the types of hedges used in the corpus and gives a classification for the present study. Guided by this framework, computer scanning and hand-picking methods are employed to identify every type of hedges, and summarize their distribution and frequency in the corpus as well. According to what are found, this thesis gives a quantitative analysis to describe the results in terms of the realization of hedging in academic abstracts, and a qualitative analysis to discuss its pragmatic functions in this kind of written text. The analyses are developed to show the numerical significance of hedging in abstracts and its pragmatic importance. Because of the limited amount of abstracts and simple calculating methods, the thesis is impossible to be a comprehensive and exhaustive study of all types of hedging strategies in academic abstracts. There must be other forms that can be identified as hedges but not mentioned in the present study.The study shows that hedging is mainly realized in two ways to show epistemic meanings, namely lexical and non-lexical hedges. Lexical hedges account for a higher proportion than non-lexical ones, with 74.45% the former and 25.55% the latter. In lexical hedges, epistemic verbs are the most frequently used forms, which account for 29.95% out of all lexical ones. Three main non-lexical strategies are found in the corpus, namely if-clause, passive voice and the first person pronouns. Among them, the first person pronouns are used more frequently than the other two, accounting for 36.6% in the non-lexical class. The distribution of hedging devices also varies in different parts of an abstract of a scientific paper. The amounts of hedges in result and discussion parts are obviously much bigger than that in introduction and method parts. In discussion part, hedges are most frequently used and account for 43% of all the hedges in the corpus. The numbers show that hedging is widely used in the abstract corpus of social scientific papers. It is realized in lexical and non-lexical forms and every form affects the interpretation of an abstract in its own way. Therefore, the functions of hedging in academic abstracts should be discussed and analyzed carefully. The pragmatic analysis shows that though hedging indicates a sense of vagueness and an abstract writing requires objectivity and accuracy, the frequent use of hedging in abstracts can follow the four maxims of Cooperative Principle. Sometimes it may also violate the maxims for the sake of implicature. In academic abstracts, hedging serves communicative textual functions to make a proposition more accurate, acceptable, and easier for audience to understand. It also serves communicative interpersonal functions to protect the positive and negative faces of readers.This study is a quantitative and qualitative analyses of hedging in English abstracts of academic papers. The result shows the significance of hedging in abstracts and contributes to the researches of hedging in specific domains. An appropriate use of hedging helps writers to develop acceptable and convincing academic abstracts and establish a good relationship with audiences. Therefore, to teach students to write an academic abstract, a teacher should not only help students to understand the structure and the nature of an abstract, but also teach them how to master hedging strategies in an abstract writing, especially in different culture context. The more appropriately a researcher can use hedging in an academic abstract, the more success he/she can achieve in academic community.