A Comparative Study Of Hedging In Research Articles Of Social Sciences And Natural Sciences

Hedges refer to words expressing indeterminacy or limitations, through which the propositions are made more rigid, accurate and objective. Hedging is one of the strategies frequently employed in academic writing. This strategy is mainly used to comment to the propositions or claims s/he presented. Meanwhile, appropriate use of hedging may not merely reflect the author's scientific attitude, his or her merits of modesty and caution as well as deference to their peers, but also leave room for future discussion. The use of hedges in research articles (hereinafter RAs) has been studied to some extent in relatively recent work. However, these studies mainly restricted to the context of academic articles on one single discipline, for example, medicine, biology and economics, few attention has been focused on hedging use in other disciplines; the comparative study of hedging in different field, for example, social sciences and natural sciences, is rare. This thesis aims to explore the possible difference and similarities of hedging between social science and natural science RAs.Based on K. Hyland's theory and modal of hedges and with a corpus-based methodology, we make a quantitative and qualitative analysis of the hedging in social science and natural science research articles. Two corpora of research articles have been set up. One is Social Science Corpus; the other is Natural Science Corpus, each corpus including 20 articles. The framework of hedging for the present study and a corresponding coding system are set up, and hedging devices adopted in the two fields are thoroughly annotated. By means of the Concord 300, the distribution regularities of hedging summarized. After a vertical analysis of hedging, this thesis goes on with a horizontal comparative analysis of hedging between the two fields, aiming to reveal the working mechanism of hedging and the binding force of different subject features on writers'hedging choice. What's more, the pragmatic function of hedging use in the two fields has been explored.The results reveal, in terms of hedging, there are not only similarities but also disciplinary discrepancies between social science RAs and natural science RAs. The similarity is hedging devices used popularly both in social sciences RAs (hereinafter SS RAs) and natural sciences RAs (hereinafter NS RAs), and play important roles. The discrepancies, first lies in the number of hedging devices, there are more hedging devices in SS RAs than that in NS RAs; second, the varieties of hedging devices, the SS RAs used more kinds of hedging devices than NS RAs, and what's more they have their own preferences in hedging use. The reasons for the discrepancies due to, on one hand, the subjects of social sciences are mainly some phenomena, which are difficult to quantify exactly and thus it is unavoidable for researchers to resort more hedging devices to account for them; on the other hand, natural sciences are dominantly concerned with quantitative modal-building and the analysis of observance to establish empirical uniformities, and thus their explanations derive from precise measurement and systematic exploration of relationship between some variables. In this sense, it is no wonder that fewer hedging devices are employed in natural sciences RAs. These findings will expectedly be of great help to the teaching of English for Academic Purpose (EAP). The thesis aims to broaden the study of hedging, enhancing the hedging awareness of writers of different scientific fields and their ability of applying hedges, and new materials for the teaching of scientific English writing.